American Surfaces

by Stephen Shore (Photographer), Glenn Howard (Designer), Bob Nickas (Introduction)

In 1972, Stephen Shore left New York City and set out with a friend to Amarillo, Texas. He didn't drive, so his first view of America was framed by the passenger's window frame. He was taken aback by the fact that his experience of life as a New Yorker had very little in common with the character and aspirations of Middle America. Later that year he set out again, this time on his own, with just a driver's licence and a Rollei 35 - a point-and-shoot camera - to explore the country through the eyes of an everyday tourist. The project was entitled American Surfaces , in reference to the superficial nature of his brief encounters with places and people, and the underlying character of the images that he hoped to capture. Shore photographed relentlessly and returned to New York triumphant, with hundreds of rolls of film spilling from his bags. In order to remain faithful to the conceptual foundations of the project, he followed the lead of most tourists of the time and sent his film to be developed and printed in Kodak's labs in New Jersey. The result was hundreds and hundreds of exquisitely composed colour pictures, that became the benchmark for documenting our fast-living, consumer-orientated world. The corpus of his work - following on from Walker Evans' and Robert Frank's epic experiences of crossing America - influenced photographers such as Martin Parr and Bernd & Hilla Becher, who in turn introduced a new generation of students to Shore's work.

Genres: Photography, Art, Travel, The United States Of America, Americana, Art and Photography

224 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1999

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

[Sara Larrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

La esencia de todo un país en un libro

[Davy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not as eye-pleasing as Uncommon Places, not by a long shot, but that was never the aim. This project/exhibition/book lends itself to some heady discussions about what makes art Art. To me, Stephen Shore's early work is more about the process, the experience, than it is about the final product (which is really saying something when you consider what a fantastic product it is). American Surfaces is an epic 20th century road trip in photographic form. It asks you to consider nothing more than that, really. These are images from the road, from the artist's life...and actually, from all our lives. Parking lots, hotel rooms, intersections, diner tables -- Shore would go on to make these settings beautiful. But here, they're just honest. American Surfaces is Shore teaching himself to tell the truth (the whole truth, nothing but etc). That's why it's his artistic breakthrough, and that's why it's (important) Art with a capital A.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Along with "Figments of the Real World", the ur-text for own personal photographic journey. Works at every level: images in a space in relation to each other, abstract colors and compositions, snapshots you scan quickly and piece together a narrative, or documentary of America at a particular place and time with each photo rewarding deep attention on its own.

[Jennifer Didik · Rating 5 out of 5]

speechless.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant photos of an America I almost remember.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding.

[dv · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a landmark book which represent the convergence of many crucial trends in photography: use of color film, snapshot esthetic, interest for the everyday and the social landscape, deadpan irony. In 1972 Shore was following Walker Evans, incorporating Warhol's influence, coming along the same path of Eggleston, starting part of what was soon to be summarized by the New Topographics 1975 exhibition and anticipating many others photographic evolutions still to come. So this is really important material. I'm a bit disappointed by the quality of the prints and by the overall book design and typographic (but we're talking about a quite cheap book).