Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979

by Stephen Shore

" Small Camera Works 1971-1979 offers an alternative account of one of the most fabled episodes in photographic the cross-country journeys that produced Stephen Shore’s luminous new vision of the American landscape, Uncommon Places. Along with his large-format camera, Shore also brought a 35mm Leica on his travels. The images made with it, on luminous colour slide film, are intimate, spontaneous and personal, while retaining Shore’s studied formal sensitivity. In these entirely unseen photographs, a parallel iteration of an iconic vision emerges like a piece of music played in a new key. The vocabulary is highways and homes, phone boxes, fast food and sun-strewn parking lots. But the alternative format unmistakably re-envisions these subjects through distinct experiments with composition, attitude, and colour. Transparencies uncovers both a detail-oriented survey of the American landscape of the 1970s and a rigorous, imaginative exercise in form by an undisputed modern master. With an afterword by Britt Salvesen, curator at LACMA, titled 'Ordinary The Vernacular in Stephen Shore’s Early 35mm Photography'."

Genres: Photography, The United States Of America

Hardcover

Published March 6, 2020

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

[Davy · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you’re considering picking this book up, you probably already know you’re going to like it. It’s not essential Shore, I don’t think, but it definitely *is* vintage Shore, and if you’re into his aesthetic, there’s a lot here to love. It fills in a tidy gap in the story of his artistry, and the essay in the back is quite insightful, so bonus points for that.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book of work from the 1970s by one of the greatest living photographers.

[Pimenta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing work. Quiet impressive to check how good it can be

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979 offers an alternative account of one of the most important episodes in photographic history: the cross-country journeys that produced Stephen Shore’s luminous new vision of the American landscape, Uncommon Places. Along with his large-format camera, Shore also brought a 35mm Leica on his travels.

A master of his craft.