Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape

by Stephen Shore

Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape presents the latest body of work from Stephen a series of photographs shot by drone from 2020 onwards, which reveal in arresting detail the interplay of natural and man-made landscapes in Montana, North Carolina, New York, and beyond. In this new body of work, Shore revisits the original ambitions of the renowned 1975 exhibition ‘New Topographics’, using a new aerial viewpoint to consider afresh the concerns of the movement – the objective, the commonplace, and the relationship of the natural and man-made in the American landscape – reflecting on how these can be applied in the twenty-first century. As much as exploring the formal possibilities of the aerial photo- graph, Topographies also displays a glorious dedication to detail and surprise, in which the slightest bend of a river or turn of a shadow uncovers the textures and colours of America’s urban and suburban landscapes, all investigated with Shore’s signature rigour. With an essay by Richard Woodward

Genres: Art, Photography

256 pages, Hardcover

Published January 26, 2023

About the author

Stephen Shore's work has been widely published and exhibited for the past forty-five years. He was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, forty years earlier. He has also had one-man shows at George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major retrospective spanning Stephen Shore's entire career. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His series of exhibitions at Light Gallery in New York in the early 1970s sparked new interest in color photography and in the use of the view camera for documentary work.

More than 25 books have been published of Stephen Shore's photographs including Uncommon Places: The Complete Works; American Surfaces; Stephen Shore, a retrospective monograph in Phaidon's Contemporary Artists series; Stephen Shore: Survey and most recently, Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979 and Stephen Shore: Elements. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art published Stephen Shore in conjunction with their retrospective of his photographic career. Stephen also wrote The Nature of Photographs, published by Phaidon Press, which addresses how a photograph functions visually. His work is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; and Sprüth Magers, London and Berlin. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

Reviews

[Davy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was fairly unmoved by the landscape shots, which doesn't mean they're bad or boring...I'm usually fairly unmoved by landscape photography. The villages and towns and intersections, though, I found quite charming. A compelling experiment from Mr. Shore, and a nice thematic sequel to his Uncommon Places project.