Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places: The Complete Works

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This practice not only informed how I photographed but what I photographed. Since I was choosing random moments, I found I was looking at situations that were not usually the subject of photographs: riding in a taxi, standing in an elevator, eating a meal, watching television. This led me to go beyond conventions not only of pictorial structure but of content, too. Stephen Shore: Retrospective". C/O Berlin. co-berlin.org. Exhibition February6– May22, 2016. Retrieved 22February 2018.

His American Surfaces series, a travel diary made between 1972 and 1973 with photographs of "friends he met, meals he ate, toilets he sat on", was not published until 1999, then again in 2005. [4] [6] Shore continued to benefit from the support of the adults around him; at age ten, a neighbor, president of a large music publishing company, gave him Walker Evans's American Photographs, a seminal work of documentary photography that would have a significant impact on Shore's own approach. Shore left the Upper West Side in 1959 to attend boarding school in Tarrytown, New York, where the headmaster, William Dexter, was an avid photographer who encouraged Shore by offering him access to his darkroom. Shore felt that his first successful photographs were taken while in Tarrytown, though he subsequently returned to New York City to attend high school at Columbia Grammar. Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore's legendary Uncommon Places has influenced more than a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape inaugurated a vital photographic tradition. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, published by Aperture in 2005, presented a definitive collection of the landmark series, and in the span of a decade has become a contemporary classic. Now, for this lushly produced reissue, the artist has added nearly 20 rediscovered images and a statement explaining what it means to expand a classic series. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated vision of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore retains precise systems of gestures in composition and light through which a hotel bedroom or a building on a side street assumes both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. An essay by critic and curator Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and a conversation with Shore by writer Lynne Tillman examine his methodology and elucidate his roots in Pop and Conceptual art. The texts are illustrated with reproductions from Shore's earlier series American Surfaces and Amarillo: Tall in Texas.

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a b "DGPh verleiht den Kulturpreis 2010 an Stephen Shore" (press release) (in German). Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie. dgph.de . Retrieved 1 April 2014. In 1973, I brought my first four-by-five work to show John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art. In those days, whenever I produced a new group of pictures I would bring them to John. That day he looked at the work and asked me if I was having fun. I was surprised by this question. I thought, Yes, I was, but I also thought that wasn’t the right answer. So I mumbled something pointless. The next time I brought a new body of work to John, he again asked if I was having fun. This time I said, “Yes.” He puffed on his pipe and said, “Good.” I felt our relationship changed after that. When I brought pictures to him from then on, he never offered advice, and only occasionally made a comment. I had the sense we were engaged in a visual communication—that he was savoring the images and taking them in. As a teenager, Stephen Shore was interested in film alongside still photography, and in his final year of high school one of his short films, entitled Elevator, was shown at Jonas Mekas' Film-Makers' Cinematheque. There, Shore was introduced to Andy Warhol and took this as an opportunity to ask if he could take photographs at Warhol's studio, the Factory, on 42nd Street. Warhol's answer was vague and Shore was surprised to receive a call a month later, inviting him to photograph filming at a restaurant called L'Aventura. Shore took up this offer and, soon afterward, began to spend a substantial amount of time at the Factory, photographing Warhol and the many others who spent time there. He had, by this point, become disengaged with his high school classes and dropped out of Columbia Grammar in his senior year, allowing him to spend more time at the Factory.

Few teenage boys possess the confidence to approach a pretty girl, let alone the courage to court the Museum of Modern Art. But in 1961, Edward Steichen-the director of MoMA’s Department of Photography at the time, and a revered photographer in his own right-received a phone call from an optimistic fourteen-year-old, by the name of Stephen Shore. ‘I think I didn’t know any better,’ Shore explains today, ‘I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to do this. So I just called him up and said, ‘I’d like to show you my work.’…He bought three!’

In 1982, a slender yet hugely impressive version of Uncommon Places was released. Its impact was felt almost immediately, forever changing the course of art photography, and securing Stephen Shore a place within the canon of photographic history. Today, there is little doubt that Uncommon Places remains a classic. Still revered throughout the international photographic community, it has, in many ways, influenced how we have come to define ‘art photography’ itself. Firstly, it introduced large-format color photography into the artistic arena. Previously this technical genre had been reserved for commercial work, but today, it has become almost ubiquitous throughout contemporary art galleries and museums around the world. Secondly, it established a number of subjective and stylistic links to the long-standing tradition of large-format, documentary photography. In the same way that Shore drew inspiration from the work of his predecessors-the attentive formalism and rich detail of Eugene Atget, the straight-forward manner and fondness for the American vernacular of Walker Evans-many of today’s photographers use Uncommon Places as a crucial source for their own imagery. For example, Thomas Struth’s first book was entitled Unconscious Places, as an homage to Shore’s masterpiece. And as often as one sees a Shore-like palette in the photographs of Thomas Struth, one can also discern the underlying influence of Atget and Evans’ perspective, having been filtered through the color work of Stephen Shore. The short answer: While I may have questions or intentions that guide what I’m interested in photographing at a particular moment, and even guide exactly where I place my camera, the core decision still comes from recognizing a feeling of deep connection, a psychological or emotional or physical resonance with the picture’s content. Fortunately, Szarkowski’s harsh criticism only fueled Shore’s determination, encouraging him to refine, rather than abandon, his initial creative impulse. At first, he suspected that if he were to make larger hand-made prints, he might convince others of the relevance of the work. But he soon realized that his negatives just weren’t up to scratch. ‘I found that the film just wasn’t good enough to support an 8’x10′ [print] even. It was just ridiculously grainy.’ Refusing to concede, Shore finally settled upon his only option; ‘I needed to go to a larger negative.’ I see much of your work, especially the digital work, as a sequence of enjoyments. You like the world. But, beneath that, there’s a serious sort of drive, which I don’t understand but am trying to. Your easygoing attitude doesn’t fool me, unless I’m a fool not to honor it.

a b c d e f g h i O'Hagan, Sean (13 November 2005). "Sean O'Hagan meets photographer Stephen Shore". The Guardian . Retrieved 2018-04-23. The New Color Photography. New York: Abbeville, 1981. ISBN 978-0896591967. Text by Sally Eauclaire. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen was born in 1951 in Witten/ Germany. He works as an art theoretician and director of the art academy Akademie der bildenden KA1/4nste in Vienna/Austria.Anglès, Daphné (February8, 2013). " Full Spectrum of a Photographer Who Made Color Cool". IHT Rendez-vous (blog). New York Times. nytimes.com. Retrieved 17February 2018. But this is only part of the story. The question remains: why this particular intersection, on this day, in this light, at this moment? That’s more like what you’ve called instinctive. There’s the sense of something taking over. I found on my road trips that, after a couple of days of driving and paying attention to what I was seeing, I would get into a very clear, quiet state of mind. Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore's legendary "Uncommon Places" has influenced more than a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape inaugurated a vital photographic tradition. "Uncommon Places: The Complete Works," published by Aperture in 2005, presented a definitive collection of the landmark series, and in the span of a decade has become a contemporary classic. Now, for this lushly produced reissue, the artist has added nearly 20 rediscovered images and a statement explaining what it means to expand a classic series. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated vision of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore retains precise systems of gestures in composition and light through which a hotel bedroom or a building on a side street assumes both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. An essay by critic and curator Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and a conversation with Shore by writer Lynne Tillman examine his methodology and elucidate his roots in Pop and Conceptual art. The texts are illustrated with reproductions from Shore's earlier series "American Surfaces" and "Amarillo: Tall in Texas." Shore photographed fashion stories for Another Magazine, Elle, Daily Telegraph and many others. [16] Commissioned by Italian brand Bottega Veneta, he photographed socialite Lydia Hearst, filmmaker Liz Goldwyn and model Will Chalker for the brand's spring/summer 2006 advertisements. [ citation needed] a b c d e f Woodward, Richard B. (30 December 2017). "Photography's Shifting Shore". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660 . Retrieved 2018-04-23– via www.wsj.com.