Looking at Shore’s 1975 photographs is, for me, like staring into a breach. Am I there? Not quite yet—I must wait another twenty-three days—and surely part of the eeriness of the experience comes from the same anxiety around nonexistence that so disturbed Nabokov’s friend. Any photograph may produce in us this unsettling sense of presence and absence, but a photograph that seems to capture the moment of our inception is likely to produce it all the more intensely.
Yet there is a second kind of disturbance too, one which arises from our distance from that June day. We may still have the banal experience of seeing a perimeter of gas stations, maybe even at the corner of Beverly and La Brea. That Chevron station still sits on the southeast corner. If we went there today and filled our cars with gasoline, we would recognize with shame that we were about to send carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But when we look at the photograph of that station in 1975, we feel not shame, exactly, but something closer to irony. To try to fathom the picture is to become ensnared in an incongruity, a disunity caused by a rift in the history of the earth’s climate. The artwork’s constitutive elements (cars, gas stations, pavement, sky) do not behave as they once may have; they do not operate with their former coherence. They now enable not Shore’s “clarity” but a different one.
Let us consider the irony that defines this present-day encounter with the photograph. It is not to be confused with outdatedness: gasoline at around sixty cents a gallon; the languid architecture and open spaces that do not yet reflect the density and infill of contemporary Los Angeles. The real ironies are also retrospective, but they are the least visible. We see the cars; we know they are emitting carbon dioxide. We see the gas stations; we know they provide the cars’ petroleum. Those realities are no more perceptibly represented than the extraction of fossil fuels from the earth, the refining of crude into fuel for cars, and the transport of that liquid material to gas stations. All are implied elements in the image, and even these unseen things are unexceptional: any complex photograph includes concealed associations and processes.