Solving Pictures

by Stephen Shore (Photographer), Quentin Bajac (Editor)

One of the most significant photographers of our time, Stephen Shore has often been considered alongside other artists who rose to prominence in the 1970s by capturing the mundane aspects of American popular culture in straightforward, unglamorous images. But Shore has worked with many forms of photography, switching from cheap automatic cameras to large-format cameras in the 1970s, pioneering the use of colour before returning to black and white in the 1990s, and in the 2000s taking up the opportunities of digital photography, digital printing and social media. Stephen Shore encompasses the entirety of the artists work of the last five decades, during which he has conducted a continual, restless interrogation of image making, from the gelatin silver prints he made as a teenager to his current engagement with digital platforms. Published to accompany the major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the book allows for a fuller understanding of Shores work, and demonstrates his singular vision defined by an interest in daily life, a taste for serial and often systematic approaches, a strong intellectual underpinning, a restrained style, sly humour and visual casualness and uncompromising pursuit of photographys possibilities. Table of ContentsDirectors Glenn D. Lowry Stephen Solving Pictures, Quentin Bajac Encyclopedia, Quentin Bajac, David Campany, Kristen Gaylord and Martino Stierli Chronology, Kristen Gaylord Exhibition History, Kristen Gaylord Bibliography, Gianna Furia Chronology, Exhibition History, Bibliography, Checklist, Index, Acknowledgements, Photo Credits, Committee on Photography / Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art

Genres: Photography

332 pages, Hardcover

Published November 16, 2017

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

[Digi M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book offers a wide look at his work. I was talking with my wife as I flipped the pages and commented that this book makes me want to travel, to walk around. But we are in the beginning of a very hot and humid Japanese summer, so I’d need to get up at 4am to capture shots which are not to be obliterated by the direct sun.

As for his photos. They are masterful and beautiful. There is one shot of a sunset in a cornfield and the colors are extraordinary.

It may not be the best place to start with him, as the photos are quite small compared to his other books. But, it offers a lot of essays and previously unseen shots.

[Philippe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about Shore's work. Its deadpan, sometimes frivolous quality has not aged well. In the era of Insta, we have become all too familiar with the marginalia of a consumerist vernacular. Photos of half-eaten meals, bulging supermarket shelves and filthy hotel rooms have ceased to strike us as an adolescent, counter-cultural prank. There is also nothing funny about the brashness of 20th-century commercialism, the infatuation with automobility and the smugness of suburbia. In fact, we are quite sick of the feeling of half-guilt that creeps up on us when we see these displays of thoughtlessness and waste. In Shore's work the mundaneness of the visual narrative is poeticised by the nobility of his technical instrument of choice. The colour images produced by an 8x10' view camera strike us a precious, whatever the subject matter depicted. It's a somewhat disconcerting feeling of being seduced into admiration.

This is not the full story, however. There's one project in Shore's output that has a markedly different weight: his documentary encounter with Ukrainian survivors of the Holocaust. Particularly poignant given the country's current predicament.

And there are some images in the book that strike me with great poetic power. They are genre pieces of extreme simplicity, which transcend post-war Americana, and have a timeless quality. A young woman, face hidden under a sun hat, and a goat in a Ukrainian meadow. A Mexican family and a dog on a country trail in Yucatan in the late afternoon light. A family scattered on the banks of the Merced River, Yosemite National Park. Shore is here a detached, empathetic observer of humanity in a kind of primal harmony with its habitat. I think these images redeem the photographer's work and infuse it with generous humanity.

This book has been put together with a lot of intelligence and dedication. It has been conceived as some sort of encyclopedia, a collection of alphabetically ordered lemmas, devoted to the locales, tools, and ideas that have animated Shore's photographic project. This makes for an varied and intertaining traversal of a sprawling body of work. There's a substantial addendum at the back. It included a photographic chronology, a bibliography, and an exhibition history. All in all the book feels like a summa of Shore's work.


Bazaliya, Khemelnytska Province, Ukraine, July 27, 2012
(photo: Stephen Shore)

Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California, August 13, 1979
(photo: Stephen Shore)