Stephen Shore on the Color Red

“I knew that red was the most difficult color to work with.”
—William Eggleston

Thirty years ago, an old-school, Magnum photographer came for a visit. He showed me a copy of his latest book. It was his first foray into color photography. Up to that point, he had been shooting in black and white professionally for four decades. I immediately noticed that every photograph had something red in it. It was as though he thought that if he loaded his camera with Kodachrome, he had to photograph something red. I also noticed that all of the reds in his pictures were, inexplicably, the exact same shade of red.

Since I began working in color in 1971, I’ve been aware of technical and formal issues with the color red. Red objects sometimes appeared flat, monochromatic, without tonal gradation. They lacked the appearance of three-dimensionality. Without the tonal gradation that we read as dimensionality, they didn’t “sit” in the spatial illusion of an image. In a sense, they floated up to the surface of the picture. The formal issue red presented was that since red attracts attention in a unique way, it can disrupt the structure of the image. A painter can choose the shade of red they want. They can choose not to use the color at all. They can place it where they want on the canvas and in relation to the other colors they have chosen. If a painter were to see a red door and want it to turn black, they would have that option. A photographer wouldn’t. We, as photographers, are tied to the world in front of us. If Fred Herzog, who made the below left in Vancouver, had instead taken it in Seattle, the Canada Post red mailbox would have been United States Postal Service dark blue.

Fred Herzog, Man with Bandage, 1968
Courtesy Equinox Gallery and the Estate of Fred Herzog

Version of Man with Bandage digitally altered by the author, 2025

Knowing this, whenever possible I avoided red unless it was central to the image, unless it accorded with the image’s structure. Otherwise, it was obvious and problematic.

When William Eggleston was quoted about the difficulty of red, he was discussing his famous picture of the red ceiling.

So, when I looked through the Magnum photographer’s color book, I had for two decades understood the issues red presented. What caught my attention, leafing through the book, was the similarity of the reds. I intuited that this similarity was key to the behavior of the color.

Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places

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Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary Uncommon Places has influenced more than a generation of photographers.

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Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places

Photographs by Stephen Shore. By Stephen Shore. Text by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and Lynne Tillman.

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Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary “Uncommon Places” has influenced more than a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape inaugurated a vital photographic tradition. “Uncommon Places: The Complete Works,” published by Aperture in 2005, presented a definitive collection of the landmark series, and in the span of a decade has become a contemporary classic. Now, for this lushly produced reissue, the artist has added nearly 20 rediscovered images and a statement explaining what it means to expand a classic series. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated vision of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore retains precise systems of gestures in composition and light through which a hotel bedroom or a building on a side street assumes both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. An essay by critic and curator Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and a conversation with Shore by writer Lynne Tillman examine his methodology and elucidate his roots in Pop and Conceptual art. The texts are illustrated with reproductions from Shore’s earlier series “American Surfaces” and “Amarillo: Tall in Texas.”

Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 208
Number of images: 176
Publication date: 2015-02-24
Measurements: 12.8 x 10.3 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597113038

Contributors

At age fourteen, Stephen Shore had his work purchased by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. At seventeen, Shore was a regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory, producing an important photographic document of the scene, and in 1971, at the age of twenty-three, he became the first living photographer since Alfred Stieglitz forty years earlier to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has had numerous one-man shows, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. He has received two NEA grants and a Guggenheim Foundation grant. Since 1982 he has been director of the photography program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen was born in 1951 in Witten/ Germany. He works as an art theoretician and director of the art academy Akademie der bildenden KA1/4nste in Vienna/Austria.
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her fiction includes the novels Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt, and No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. Tillman’s art and literary criticism has been published in Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Nest, the Village Voice, The Guardian, Bomb, and The New York Times Book Review. She has written stories for the artists’ books and catalogues of a variety of contemporary artists, including Kiki Smith, Juan Munoz, Jessica Stockholder, Barbara Kruger, Roni Horn, and Vik Muniz. Her most recent story collection, This Is Not It, appeared in 2002. Tillman’s new novel, American Genius, A Comedy, will be published in October by Soft Skull Press.

I had recently attended a workshop on the use of Adobe Photoshop. This was in the days of Photoshop 3 (as I write this, Photoshop is up to version 26). The workshop was taught by Richard Benson, a true master of photomechanical reproduction and a professor at Yale, and an engineer from Adobe, whose business card listed his position as “Digital Evangelist.” In that workshop, I learned about “gamut,” the range of colors that film or a digital sensor can record, and that gamut is always more circumscribed than what our eyes can see.

When a shade of red falls outside the gamut of a particular device, it is typically mapped to the closest reproducible red at the edge of the gamut. This process, known as “clipping,” substitutes the nearest available color, which can lead to distortions in tonal gradation and saturation.

Stephen Shore, Pueblo Bonito, New Mexico, June 1972
© the artist and courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Stephen Shore, Amarillo, Texas, July 1972
© the artist and courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

This clipping effect explains why certain red objects in photographs may appear flat and lack shading or tonal variations. Since the out-of-gamut red is replaced by a single reproducible red, subtle differences in brightness or hue are lost, resulting in a uniform appearance that diminishes three-dimensionality.

In essence, a pie-shaped wedge of different shades of red lying outside a material’s gamut are all assigned the same red at the edge of the gamut. These issues stem from the spectral sensitivities of dyes in color films and design constraints of digital sensors. Color negative film has a larger color space than transparency film; and transparency film, in turn, has a larger color space than digital sensors. The larger the color space, the less clipping.

We, as photographers, are tied to the world in front of us.

I can use Photoshop to turn Herzog’s red Canadian mailbox dark blue, but I can’t restore the tonal gradation and modeling that was lost to clipping on his original transparency. It will always appear two-dimensional.

While red is the color most vulnerable to clipping, clipping is not unique to it. The blue of skies, for example, experiences clipping. But the rendering of sky is not dependent on three-dimensional modeling.

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1971–74
© Eggleston Artistic Trust and courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1971–74
© Eggleston Artistic Trust and courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner

Clipping can be clearly seen in two photographs by Bill Eggleston.

Not only are the ketchup bottles and the painted wall rendered the same red, but the lack of gradation and shading makes the bottles appear flat. All the reds run together.

The car door’s embossing in the shade shows gradation of tone, but in the direct sunlight, the reds are clipped. The embossing disappears. The shaded part appears three-dimensional; the sunlit part is flat.

One final example.

In this picture of my wife, Ginger, the red of the shirt lacks the tonal modeling that I see on her skin. To be honest, it was years before I really noticed the problem with the red in this picture. I couldn’t take my eyes off the intensity and intelligence of Ginger’s face. This may be proof that love is blind.

This article originally appeared in Aperture No. 260, “The Seoul Issue,” under the column Notebook.