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# From the Bookshelf
- URL: https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/bookshelf-mental-image/
- Published: 2026-09-16T16:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-18T09:59:32.000Z
- Description: Stephen Shore — The Mental Image
- Author: Jon Nicholls
- Tags: Bookshelf

You’re reading in bed, absorbed by the words, increasingly drowsy and, slowly, you become aware of your own hands holding the book. It’s as if you are hovering just above your own head, looking at your own looking. It’s spooky. Most of us have experienced something like this and it’s a sudden, unsettling view of the ordinary construction of vision. I’ve spent a couple of days with [Stephen Shore’s latest book](https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/the-mental-image-stephen-shore?%5Fpos=1&%5Fpsq=shore&%5Fpsid=f92db1b23&%5Fss=e&ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) and it reminded me of this experience. “When you observe this book being held in your hands,” he writes, “you are seeing a mental image.” He means it, literally. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/IMG_8801-1.jpeg)

Francis Picabia - **Here, This is Stieglitz Here*, 1915 

Shore opens his new book with a picture of a broken machine. Francis Picabia's *Ici, c'est ici Stieglitz*, 1915, draws the great champion of photography as a Vest Pocket Kodak, the cheapest snapshot camera of its day, bellows out but disengaged, lens fixed on the word IDEAL, the whole contraption stalled by a set of automobile gears left in park. FOI ET AMOUR, faith and love, are lettered down the side. It was a caricature, a friend's mockery of a man his circle feared was losing the will to fight. Shore knows this, and prints it anyway. Faith and love, on a machine that can’t drive. 

The Mental Image completes a trilogy. [*The Nature of Photographs*](https://www.phaidon.com/en-gb/products/the-nature-of-photographs?srsltid=AU7gw4W5yJre%5FeN596cB0PiRqVCCVOt7wd2LaiyctLPXe7paoSzwyz0m&ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) (1998) and [*Modern Instances*](https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/modern-instances-the-craft-of-photography-expanded-edition-br-stephen-shore?srsltid=AU7gw4VRpPF2lF0ixdOSwIM%5FbNQ-2Sxzbf5te9V9rVkxB%5FbaI71X00Tu&ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) (2022, updated 2023) were both relatively cool, forensic and patient explorations of how a photograph works. The trilogy ends on what Shore calls the mental level, the apprehension that joins lens, eye, attention and mind. This third book feels different. Valedictory. A final reckoning with the medium he loves so much, before the shutter snaps shut. 

Before the main argument, Shore generously thanks his forbears and mentors. He didn’t apprentice himself to only one photographer, but he understood that he could yoke himself to a tradition, the straight line from O’Sullivan and the survey photographers through Strand and Evans, the deadpan record that trusts the world to be enough. Evans’s American Photographs, a gift at ten. Frederick Sommer, met at Shore’s own show, who taught that the straight photograph could hold the strange and the lyric without ceasing to be straight. The book is partly about teachers and what problems they were solving. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/IMG_8804.jpeg)

George N. Barnard - **Sudley Church, Bull Run*, (Cropped version) 1862

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/IMG_8803-1.jpeg)

George N. Barnard - **Sudley Church, Bull Run*, (Uncropped) 1862

Much of the writing is clear and practical. Early on he presents two versions of a 1862 George N. Barnard photograph of a ruined church, on successive pages, a crop and Barnard’s fuller frame. The crop announces the church as the subject. The full frame shows the church sharing the picture with the ground and the broken tree stumps. It’s in these stumps and the visual journey across the ground leading up to the church, where the weight of Barnard’s attention actually fell. The soldier’s cut down the trees because they needed to see the enemy more clearly. If you crop for the subject you can distort the photographer’s mental image. Solid advice. The mental image is not the subject. It’s the distribution of the photographer’s attention across the field of view. It leaves a visible trace in what a photographer includes and where the weight lands. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/Shore-Mental-Image.jpg)

And consider the cover image, Dieter Appelt’s *The Mark on the Mirror Made by Breathing*. A photograph is inert until a present, attentive, breathing body activates it. It’s the mental image caught in the act. If the book remained on that ground it would be indispensable enough, a plain account of seeing as construction and of learning to catch your own construction. But Shore seems to want more and it’s where I begin to have doubts. He claims the mental image travels. That the inner picture in the photographer is embedded in the print (it’s not clear how) and reconstructed, faithfully, in an attentive viewer, maker to picture to receiver, joined directly rather than by metaphor. Furthermore, he suggests that physics will one day come up with the right language to explain it. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/09/IMG_8805.jpeg)

He offers demonstrations. Two photographs of a wall, one tripod, a minute apart, framing and focus and exposure held fixed, the only variable the person pressing the shutter, a first-year student for one and Shore for the other. He asks whether one is deeper and richer in tonality. It is, apparently. I looked for a long time at the two images in the book, encouraged by the author to be more aware of my own looking, and could not see any difference at all. I am willing to believe the fault is mine, except the book has already made that belief impossible to test, because earlier Shore has said the difference resides primarily in the viewer’s mental image, not in the reproduction. The evidence is not in the evidence. Whatever I’m meant to see is not on the page I’m looking at. My failing to see it can’t count against him. A theory that treats every failure to perceive as proof that the reader has not yet learned to perceive can’t be argued with. A photographer of Shore’s seriousness should feel the floor falling away. 

At the book’s hinge, the demonstrations give way to a story. In 1917 the composer Ernest Bloch challenged Alfred Stieglitz that photography could not be art. Stieglitz proposed a contest. The two of them photographed the same midtown corner, same camera, same position, same focus, Stieglitz first and then Bloch. Bloch saw the prints and admitted his own was dull and lifeless. How can this be, he asked, when everything was identical. And Stieglitz answered: “it is because you do not love it; you do not believe in it.” 

That’s the true foundation of the book. Everything built on top of it is scaffolding. It’s not a claim about the photograph at all. Bloch asks about the object and Stieglitz answers about the soul. The difference isn’t in the camera or the silver but in whether the maker’s heart was right. It is a theory of grace, not of physics, and the words are the ones Picabia lettered down the side of his broken-machine. Shore reaches throughout for the hard warrant of science because love sounds soft. But in the middle of the book he hands the microphone to Stieglitz who calls it love and belief. The tradition is a discipline of love. Love leaves traces you can feel and cannot measure. That is unprovable and it may well be true, as pedagogy, because every teacher of any art knows that a student’s indifference or lack of care does reveal itself in the work. Stieglitz isn’t wrong. He’s only wrong to stage a contest to prove it, because it can’t be proved, only shown, and only learned the way Shore learned it, from a mature artist, in a community, over many years. *Camera Work*, Shore's name for the tradition, holds a guild and a priesthood in one phrase. The see-er and the seer. 

A sense of loss is at the heart of the book. Six pages after Stieglitz, Shore remembers his dog, Lulu, who as as a six month old pup said “ah woo oo woo”. Shore suggests that she was trying to speak but knew she couldn’t and so never tries again. Every time he recalls it, he writes, his heart is touched. It’s easy to file this under an old man’s sentiment but it would be unfair because the story is exact. A creature strains to communicate across an unfathomable gap. The ‘words’ don’t carry but the look does, wordlessly. 

That’s the whole book, and it’s a kind of author self-portrait, although he never says so. The difference is that Lulu stopped trying to communicate and Shore didn’t. Perhaps because he’s afraid. The tradition he loves is dissipating, he thinks, like a stream into a desert. The wisdom, handed from a mature artist to a young one, is the part he believes may not survive. There are way more photography graduates now and too few photographers able to mentor them. He doesn’t think the next generation will have what he enjoyed. So the book sets out to be a paper mentor. The book is itself the thing it describes, an attempt to reach across a void without a voice to carry it. It half-succeeds and half-fails in exactly the way it says a photograph does. 

My own doubt about the theory remains. A photograph, to me, is untameable and excessive. Shore’s transmission model, taken at its word, would close that down, making the good viewer the accurate one. But I don’t think that’s finally what the book believes, because its own best pictures refuse it. The fogged mirror on the cover. The dog, simply witnessed. The Barnard asks you to look harder, not to receive what the photographer already saw. Shore the theorist wants to transmit. Shore the artist keeps making things that ask only to be attended to, which is a better and humbler faith. Put the sentimentality, carefully, to one side. His love of photography isn’t a disguise for dubious assertions. The assertions are a disguise for love, a man reaching for physics because he can’t bear that love might not be a strong enough reason for anyone to keep looking. What Shore is really asking, under the theory and the demonstrations and the appeal to a science that does not yet exist, is that you not abandon this slow, attentive, embodied way of making pictures for the cheaper and quicker options now to hand. That you love it enough to give it the time it needs. 

He’s right that this can’t be proved. He may be right that it can be lost. And the book, whatever the state of its arguments, is what it looks like when someone refuses to let it go.

---

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