It is rare that a museum presentation manages to reveal new and thought-provoking correlations between photographers. Curator Christoph Schaden recently succeeded in doing just this at the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf with the ambitious exhibition Der Rote Bulli: Stephen Shore and the Düsseldorf School of Photography, a show consisting of more than four hundred photographs by Shore, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and twenty-one artists who studied under Bernd Becher during his tenure at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie from 1976 to 1996.

Shore first met the Bechers in 1973, through the renowned curator Weston Naef. The American photographer later recalled the couple’s suggestion that he focus more in his color photography on the intersections of main streets—advice he did not heed: it was the essence of the streets that he wished to capture, creating with his images a comprehensive portrait of a society. In the early 1980s the Bechers acquired a print of Shore’s first large-format 1974 photograph, of a red VW bus (in German nicknamed a “rote Bulli”) standing at an intersection in Easton, Pennsylvania. The image, first published in the New Yorker magazine, was not only a nod to Walker Evans (who had photographed the area in the 1930s); it was also a significant point of reference in Shore’s own oeuvre, especially with regard to his further work with the largeformat camera.

After Shore and William Eggleston published their first books of photography in the late 1970s and early ’80s, a number of photographers in Germany began loading their cameras with color film as well. Among these were some of Bernd Becher’s students—in defiance of their teacher, who worked exclusively in black and white—exploring their own surroundings in all their apparent banality: consider Thomas Ruff’s interiors, Kris Scholz’s Düsseldorf street scenes, and Candida Höfer’s series Türken in Deutsch land (Turks in Germany). Upon its publication in 1982, Becher recommended Shore’s Uncommon Places to his students as a source of inspiration. Five years later, Thomas Struth rephrased the work with his own book, Unbewusste Orte (Unconscious places), which includes numerous New York street scenes and is clearly influenced by Shore.

The engagement between the U.S. and German photography scenes went both ways. Following their early-1970s exhibitions in the United States (including one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 and another at the George Eastman House in 1974), the Bechers and their conceptual focus became important reference points in the development of American photography. The couple traveled the country and photographed extensively, and in 1975 they were the only non-American participants— showing alongside Shore and others—in the seminal New Topographies show at the George Eastman House.

When Bernd Becher was named professor at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in 1976, he founded what would become a legendary course in art photography, the first of its kind in Germany. A year later, thanks to Becher’s influence, Shore had his first exhibition in Europe—also in Düsseldorf. It was a time of upheaval in the photography scene: color work was suddenly considered museum worthy and galleries were showcasing fashion photography; photographic publications were printed in larger editions and photographic exhibitions became increasingly popular.

All this forms the backdrop for the Pote Bulli show, in which the links between Shore’s works and those by Becher’s students were often made evident by their placement in direct opposition to one another. The exhibition focused on the early phase of emerging photographers’ development—the early 1980s for the first generation of Becher students (including Höfer, Ruff, Struth, Andreas Gursky, and Axel Hütte); and ten years later for the second wave (including Claus Goedicke, Laurenz Berges, and Elger Esser). The formally reduced photographs of cars by Bernhard Fuchs, facing Shore’s red VW, seem to outline the transformation of American urbanity into the romantic melancholy of the German and Austrian landscape. Similarly, the minute detail of the boy in the window in Shore’s photograph from Easton can be understood as a subtle animation of the moment. The precise detail in the image is due to his use of an 8-by-10-inch studio camera and the correspondingly large negative that records more visual information than smaller negative formats. This would be a decisive factor in Shore’s longstanding use of the otherwise cumbersome large-format camera.

It is curious that the very intentionally composed Rote Bulli picture was cropped to such an extent when used as a “key visual” for the exhibition. On the catalog cover, for example, the left half of the photograph is wrapped around the spine; on the exhibition posters and in advertisements for the show in German photography magazines the urban boundaries on either side of the original photograph are missing—although all these compositional factors serve to generate the illusion of depth in the photograph. (Interestingly, according to the curator, the use of the image excerpts was cleared with Shore.)

In conjunction with Der Rote Bulli, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (German Photographic Association) bestowed Shore with its highest honor, the Kulturpreis, which Bernd and Hilla Becher received twenty-five years ago—thus closing yet another circle. At the same time, the contemporary reception of Shore’s work enters the next round: one of his iconic images from 1975, of a gas station at the corner of Los Angeles’s Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, was recently taken as a point of departure by six emerging German photographers in their pictures of the city. The project, La Brea Matrix, initiated by Cologne photo-book publisher Markus Schaden (brother of Rote Bulli curator Christoph), will be presented in 2011 with a publication and exhibition of the resulting photographic series. One thing is certain: Shore will continue to inspire for years to come.©

Matthias Harder

Der Rote Bulli was presented at the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, September 11, 2010-January 16, 2011.

Matthias Harder is Chief Curator of the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin and author of many publications on art and photography.