Factory

by Stephen Shore, Lynne Tillman (Contributor)

Warhol's Factory as seen through the lens of a young Shore, providing an insider view of this extraordinary moment and place

Stephen Shore was 17 years old when he began hanging out at The Factory - Andy Warhol's legendary studio in Manhattan. Between 1965 and 1967, Shore spent nearly every day there, taking pictures of its diverse cast of characters, from musicians to actors, artists to writers, and including Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, and Nico - not to mention Warhol himself. This book presents a personal selection of photographs from Shore’s collection, providing an insider's view of this extraordinary moment and place, as seen through the eyes of one of photography's most beloved practitioners.

Genres: Art, Photography

192 pages, Hardcover

Published October 24, 2016

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

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this is largely an oversize coffee table book of photographs taken during the heyday of Warhol's Factory years ('65-'67), there is also a surprising amount of text, comprised of interviews with many of the subjects of said photos - and I actually found those of much more interest than the pictures themselves - many of which are blurry and out of focus. Also, there are several pages of film strips of 'proofs' in which the pictures are so tiny (2 X 3 inches) that one cannot really make out much - a total waste of space. Regardless, many of the photos are of interest, especially the ones of an impossibly young Lou Reed - he looks like he's 12 (although was in actuality 23)!

[Kass James · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're interested in the artistic cooperative space founded by Warhol and Shore, this is an excellent photographic prospective into that world. Artists of every type collaborated and socialized with one another, building an artistic movement in art, music, and theatre that is still felt to this day.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book, Beautiful work