Luzzara

by Stephen Shore

In 1993 world renowned photographer Stephen Shore travelled to Luzzara, a comune in the province of Reggio Emilia, Italy. Here Shore photographed the town’s people, streets and squares, just as another American master, Paul Strand had done forty years earlier, when he produced the seminal book Un Paese with the Italian screenwriter of The Bicycle Thieves Cesare Zavattini.

STANLEY/BARKER has revisited Shore’s series with an exquisitely produced limited edition publication of Luzzara, which includes a number never before seen photographs.

Speaking of his purpose Shore said, "There was no way I could approach Luzzara as though I was not familiar with Strand's work. At the same time, even though I was going to Luzzara exactly forty years after Strand, I was not interested in producing a re-photographic survey. In a certain way, Strand's work does not need simple updating, because the kinds of people and farms and landscapes he photographed still exist in very much the same form today. But, they exist side by side with the modern world. A key feature of Italian life, at least to my New World eyes, is the presence of the traditional within the modern. My aim, then, was to produce a companion volume to Un Paese; to produce a group of pictures, which to the limit of the subjectivity of my vision, supplement Strand's work."

80 pages, Hardcover

Published May 1, 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.