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I went to the Marquette University Art Museum to catch the Stephen Shore’s Biographical Landscape exhibition. The museum arranges Shore’s work in a noticeable order: at first I encountered the two series that fleeting moment of time passing: through presence the trace of clouds and the over-illuminated city people. The two series are in small black and white prints and try to make the still part in each print consistent. Followed these series are the small versions of Shore’s Uncommon Places. An individual large print contains a set of color photographs showing the insignificant aspects of everyday life or a journey life. Once again I notice the importance of juxtaposition of a group of images.

Shore’s major series is presented in 8x10 large prints and vivid color: the images trace down his journey around the lands of America, titled Uncommon Places. I am impressed by plenty of objects in his images: McDonald in 1974 has beverage of Ice Milk, 57cent is the gas price in the Los Angels 1975. The design of theatre board does not change from the past and so as other sign boards on the road. In this highly pixilated pictures that one can even read the wrinkles of the bed sheet, the ripples of the pancake syrup and the textures of Ginger Shore’s thereat handbag, what I truly read is not only the glorification of the American banalities, but also the mere change of the American society in the past thirty years. I notice that I have never seen a large print photograph of a singular object in the seventies of my country. The decade of seventies of China in my mind is always involved with a street merged with people and without any color due to the only black and white documentation. Therefore, the decade seems mythologize and far away from today. It is grateful in America that there are street photographers like Shore in the seventies to document the society with their photographic eyes.

Last but not the least I would associate Shore’s works with Paul Chan’s journey to Baghdad, as documenting in the series Baghdad is Not Particular Order. When watching Chan’s documentary without particular order I can see the perspective of Chan to focus on the land of Baghdad as a friendly foreign comer although he never intends to make it a performative documentary in order to state out his experience of living in Baghdad. Chan has only be involved in the camera once when a local camera worker was experiencing in using Chan’s camera and shot Chan in few seconds. Nevertheless, the footages of a desolate land shot through the car window and from a seat position inside a moving car, along with the music from radio, an American popular song in Arabic version, is still suggesting the perspective of this documentary. The journey of Shore around the American road is also the same: he rarely put himself into any of his photographs to enlighten his life, but other than that he engages himself to all the places he has been to : motel that he slept, restaurant that he stopped by, tent in the mountains of Wyoming and so on. Neither Chan nor Shore considers how to document themselves into their pieces, but they lay aside themselves and engage to the place. Thus, there would never be a particular order of Baghdad since those footages cannot be ordered by Chan himself. Thus, the junk spaces that we might encounter everyday can become “uncommon places” is not because whether there is people interacted.