We rifle through the pages of the celebrated American image-maker's brand new photo-book – an evocative portrait of the Italian village of Luzzara
On a particularly dreary day in London, we're looking to a brand new book from lauded photographer Stephen Shore – featuring shots from the idyllic Italian comune of Luzzara, in the province of Reggio Emilia – for our daily dose of escapism. It may come as a surprise to learn that the book's images are all in black and white, Shore being best-known for his exquisite colour studies, which have seen him ranked alongside William Eggleston and Joel Meyerowitz, as one of the great pioneers of American colour photography.
So why the move to monochrome? The book, titled Luzzara, is in fact the second time that the commune – its people, fields, squares and streets – have been captured through the lens of an American master. As Paul Strand fans will know, Luzzara forms the entire subject matter of Strand's seminal 1955 book Un Paese: Portrait of an Italian Village, created with Italian screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, which was the driving motivation behind Shore's decision to visit the village in 1993. But although inspired by Strand, Shore was very wary of merely recreating the photo-book for the modern day viewer, aiming instead to "produce a companion volume to Un Paese," to use his own words.
"There was no way I could approach Luzzara as though I was not familiar with Strand's work," he expands. "At the same time, even though I was going to Luzzara exactly 40 years after Strand, I was not interested in producing a re-photographic survey. In a certain way, Strand's work does not need simple updating, because the kinds of people and farms and landscapes he photographed still exist in very much the same form today. But, they exist side by side with the modern world. A key feature of Italian life, at least to my New World eyes, is the presence of the traditional within the modern."
Indeed, the resulting images (many of which have never been seen prior to the book's publication) are in many ways timeless, dateable only by way of boldly printed shirts and distinctly 90s curtains (think Nick Carter during his Backstreet Boys heyday) and details such as a child's tightly clasped dummy, or a 90s Fiat. Like Strand's images before his, Shore's works paint an evocative portrait of a tight-knit community, bound by family values and removed from the rat race of city life, and demonstrate the photographer's great propensity for composition and timing.
Luzzara by Stephen Shore is out now, published by STANLEY/BARKER.
