The Mental Image

by Stephen Shore

The Mental Image is the latest book by Stephen Shore, one of the most influential photographers, writers, and teachers working today. Here, Shore turns to the inner life of how photographs are imagined, sensed, and carried in the body. Following on from The Nature of Photographs (2013) and Modern The Craft of Photography (2022), this richly illustrated volume brings together numerous anecdotes, influences, references, and teachings to show how visualisation, attention, and embodiment can fundamentally alter how we perceive the world around us. Both practical and philosophical, The Mental Image offers a luminous and disciplined approach to seeing, for photographers, artists, and anyone drawn to a deeper understanding of perception.

112 pages, Paperback

Published September 19, 2026

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.