Stephen Shore

by Stephen Shore, Michael Friend, Joel Sternfeld

Stephen Shore (b. 1947) is a true artistic innovator whose work has opened up new frontiers for contemporary photography. His photographs of American scenes unveil the exceptional beauty to be found in the everyday. As one of the first art photographers to work in color, Shore pioneered such contemporary genres as the diaristic snapshot (later taken up by Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans) and the monumentalized landscape (as later practiced by Becher-school photographers Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky). This monograph offers the first complete examination of Shore's long and storied career, from his residency at Warhol's Factory to his experiments in conceptual photography; from his landmark series AMERICAN SURFACES to his continued exploration of emerging techniques. Shore's high-key portraits of America's chromatic landscape can be found in the permanent collections of major museums all over the world.

Genres: Photography, Art, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 2007

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 5 out of 5]

I think I've found a new favorite photographer. (Or, I now have a favorite photographer, to be more precise.) Stephen Shore represents pretty much everything I love about photography, about art -- about America, even. It's unassuming, understated, unpretentious, and absolutely mesmerizing. Hypnotic. Each photograph is like a puzzle that rewards an infinite number of possible solutions. Whichever way you approach his work, it welcomes you, and you always leave with something you didn't have before. A photograph of tree bark almost brought me to tears the other day. Not because oak trees possess extraordinary depth of emotion, but because I suddenly saw exactly what he saw. I looked at the image -- at the fissures and the contrast and the texture -- and understood exactly why he took that photograph. It was a profound moment of connection, of sympathetic awe. And I feel some degree of that with every turn of the page. He's the photographer I could never be -- 40 years ago, he perfected an aesthetic I can only flirt with in my own pursuits. This is not discouraging. In fact, it's exhilarating. I'm so glad someone had the vision and the talent and the wherewithal to get these images of America in front of America. It was his priceless gift to all of us, not just the photography enthusiasts or the art critics, but for all of the inhabitants of this particular place, at that particular time, and for all places, and for all time.

[Ben Rowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent overview of a great photographer however whilst its nice to see some of his other work than American Surfaces and Uncommon Places and indeed although less memorable perhaps I think I actually like some of the other work more I felt than 90% of the text was only a few touches better than filler and I feel either of the two classic photobooks would be better in my collection and a better reading experience than this very solid overview. That said I got this cheap in a sale so I guess for that it was a solid hit.

[Wesley Verhoeve · Rating 5 out of 5]

My word.

[Zioluc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un testo su Stephen Shore che include:
- un'intervista di Michael Fried con l'autore che ripercorre i suoi lavori più importanti (anni '70) fino a metà anni 2000: splendida, ricca di informazioni e dettagli sul lavoro dell'autore.
- un commento dettagliato del fuoriclasse Joel Sternfeld a una foto di Shore: prolissa, corretta ma non particolarmente acuta, mi aspettavo molto di più.
- una galleria di "scelte dell'artista" che ho trovato francamente inutile
- bibliografia, cronologia ecc.
- molte delle magnifiche, ipnotiche, enigmatiche, magiche fotografie di Shore.