Early Work

by Stephen Shore (Photographer)

At the age of six, Stephen Shore received a Kodak Darkroom kit, a gift that unearthed a passion and inquisitiveness that would go on to define his entire life. Shore began to develop a unique relationship to the chemical alchemy of the darkroom and to the camera itself: a tool through which he would uncover the characters and complexities of the world around him.

Early Work collects for the first time the entirely unseen photographs created during Shore’s early teenage years between 1960 and 1965, a period of rich experimentation that precedes his time working with Andy Warhol at The Factory. These sophisticated and ambitious images demonstrate Shore’s already-complex understanding of the photographic form, and the particular attention with which he approached his surroundings. It offers a unique record of the vibrant energy of New York in the early 1960s, and reveals the themes that provided a constant source of interest for the young photographer.

Above all, Early Work offers an authoritative account of the innate sensibility with which Shore approached not only his craft but the world around him, from this early age.

Includes a new essay by Stephen Shore.

172 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2025

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.