American Surfaces: Revised & Expanded Edition

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This photograph is striking for its intimacy; the subjects appear aware of Shore's camera, but unperturbed by it. The famous figures in the images are captured in an unguarded, human and apparently ordinary moment. Shore's talent for recognizing the value of the everyday and capturing it is clear in this image, which would later serve as a document of an important cultural moment. The lighting, soft yet bright, creates a sense of ethereality, as does the grain of the image, which is particularly apparent in the textured hair and clothes of the figures at the foreground, at once heightening their inaccessibility and their apparent reality in a manner that accords with the mythical status Warhol's Factory and its denizens would attain. For 22 months beginning in March 1972, Shore traveled across the continental United States with a simple Rollei 35 – a camera so diminutive in stature that it earned the title of smallest 35mm camera in production at the time [ more on the Rollei 35 can be seen here in our review]. It was this tiny camera which allowed him to blend in, to never give the air of a serious photographer, and which granted him accessibility to people and places without question or query. It was the normality, the civilian nature of a compact 35mm loaded with color film which let him make important work right under the noses of people looking for Leica-clad members of Magnum. 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.

Alternately, to say that the new edition amounts to revisionism on Shore’s part is to beg a point pre-empted by the nature of the project from its beginning, which had always been somewhat ad hoc in form. With the admitted benefit of hindsight, one can suggest that none of the constituent parts that now make up the American Surfaces phenomenology rightly ought to be considered outside of the others. It has at this point become a motile and fluid architecture for photographic meaning: simultaneously conceptual, documentary, formalist, art historical and (paradoxically for a photographic series) atemporal. In its most radical orientation, the project breaks through the conventions and limitations of photographic practice not by attempting to perfect its documentation of life, but by positioning its execution, in all of its fractious non-linearity, as an exercise in life. He also has been working on a series about Holocaust survivors in Ukraine. It is an unusual project for Shore: Art critics have typically downplayed his photos’ content and discussed instead their formal qualities or conceptual ideas. “I’m self aware enough to know that when I’m doing this, I‘m photographing much more loaded subject matter than I’ve ever dealt with before,” Shore said. “So the question is: Can I take a picture that is not just an illustration of the content but is a visually coherent picture and that could stand alone even if one didn’t know what I was photographing and also somehow communicate some essence of the situation?” From here, it’s going to feel like I’m skipping forward for a moment. The American Surfaces series was shot between 1972 and 1973, but it wasn’t published as a proper book until 1999 – nearly three decades later! Before this, it existed merely as a gallery exhibition. Shore was just 24 years old at the time he took these images, yet served another full lifetime in this respect when the book was eventually published at age 51. At the time that this series became a book, his life – and his career for that matter – were very different.VH: You were born in New York City but your journey took you through small-town America. Were you looking to photograph communities that felt familiar to you or those that felt different from where and how you grew up? Shore returned from that initial road trip with nearly 100 rolls of film, which he developed as any ordinary person would: He sent them to a Kodak factory in New Jersey. He then showed the snapshots in New York’s LIGHT Gallery in 1972. The art world was not enthused, but Shore continued the project anyway. He kept photographing places around the country (and a few in England) through 1973. This same year, he switched to the large-format camera, first a 4x5 and later an 8x10. When you left the Factory, you began shooting in color, which at the time was widely regarded as a kitschy, banal mode. What prompted that switch? Content inseparable from attention to form. It occurs to me that there’s no such thing as a definitive Steven Shore photograph, except that it’s by default like nothing else. I recognize it, but not as an instance of “style.” It’s more like entry to a zone of immediate experience. I feel a little lost, as I do in my real life. You don’t pin down; you unpin up, if that makes any sense. Shore's expressive use of vivid color is particularly noteworthy in this image. The bright, acidic blue of the swimming pool produces an emotional response from the viewer, linking them with the world of the image whilst refusing to signpost or label particular feelings. The cream skin of Shore's model, Ginger, who would later become his wife, matches the tones of the patio at the edge of the pool, drawing the viewer's attention to the sunlight on her arms and shoulders; the suggestion that it is the side that faces away from the viewer that is bathed in light and that reveals her identity provokes a sense of distance and longing which, in turn, provokes consideration of the moment, now lost, that the camera has captured. Shore's images in Uncommon Places make an argument for its value at a time when it was frequently dismissed as detracting from form and light. It is the repetition of blues and tan tones that serves, in this image, to draw the viewer's attention to the diagonal planes in the image and to the play of light on various surfaces. Shore felt that color provided images with an honesty, allowing him to communicate the experience of seeing as opposed to the translation of the world into a piece of art further separated from it.

I went to the view camera really for a simple reason that I wanted to continue with American Surfaces, but I wanted a larger negative to make bigger prints, because film at the time wasn’t very sharp,” he said. Look at the first Uncommon Places photos and the continuity with American Surfaces is obvious: For instance, he shoots his hotel television and bed. Soon, however, the images move away from interior spaces toward large images of neglected architecture, parking lots, and street intersections, . And so flipping to Uncommon Places whose images are so lucid that it feels as though I could step inside and walk around, I am hardly aware of the camera at all. But for this to be possible, it meant that there was a trade-off and that barrier to realism posed by the ever-present flash in American Surfaces was replaced with Shore’s own sacrifice of a moment for our own enjoyment of its image. Stephen Shore was born in 1947 and grew up on New York City's Upper East Side. Shore's family was Jewish, and he was the only child. The family owned a succesful business and Stephen lived a privileged existence, with annual trips to Europe and regular exposure to art and other forms of culture. He was given a darkroom set by an uncle when he was six, which he used to develop his family's snapshots, taken with a simple and inexpensive Kodak Brownie, often experimenting with different ways of printing the images using cardboard masks. Shore had little practice taking his own photographs, however, until the age of nine, when his parents bought him a 35 mm camera. After serving as informal house-photographer in Andy Warhol's factory in the late sixties, Stephen Shore came into international prominence with his celebrated first one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1971—the venerable institution's first-ever exhibition of a living photographer. Since then, his work has stood at the forefront of photography's increasingly important relation to contemporary art, pioneering new forms of color photography and conceptualism while preserving an interest in craft and composition integral to the medium since its nineteenth century invention. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

Stephen Shore: American Surfaces, Revised & Expanded Edition

American Surfaces was first published as a book of seventy-two images in 1999. In 2005, consistent with his practice of revisiting and reworking earlier series through the medium of the photobook, Shore published the series in its entirety for the first time, and applied a cohesive structure to the works, grouping them by year and the state in which they were taken (see Shore 2005). These digital prints owned by Tate were made in the same year in an edition of ten.

Analog photography would seem to demand a more considered approach. If you’re shooting a plate of pancakes with an eight-by-ten, you’re forced to be conspicuous, highly intentional. Or is that wrong? Do you think your early photographs could have been shot digitally? Shore is an altogether quieter photographer, but there is quirky humour in his images of vernacular buildings and signage that has often been overlooked. His eye lights on a barber’s shop window announcing the delights of Tyrone, the Great Contour Haircutter, and on a neon pharmacy sign that reads, perhaps without irony, Strange Drugs. There is a sense of someone discovering a whole new world of surprises under his nose: an America so obvious as to go unnoticed. It is now definably Stephen Shore’s America, though it nods to Robert Frank’s and, even more so, to Walker Evans’s America. These exhibits are an opportunity to admire the pure power of the camera at a time when many of us regard it as just another app on our smartphones. On social media, we stand in a buffet line of each other’s photos, stuffed but never satisfied. Shore’s large-format pictures from the 1970s, by contrast, are gourmet meals. The shows are also reminders, however, that before Shore adopted the large-format camera, he was making visual diaries in which he took a snapshot of every meal he ate, person he met, and bed he slept in. I do think about why people are all of a sudden looking at my work,” he told me 10 years ago, “and it occurs to me that it may have needed a distance in time for people to see what I was actually looking at. People need time. It’s much easier to look at the past than to look at the present.”This image, from Shore's best-known series, Uncommon Places, shows a table set for breakfast at what appears to be a diner. The breakfast setting, on a table lined with a lamination imitating wood, is positioned on a diagonal from the camera. It consists of a plate of pancakes, encircled by Hopi petroglyphs, positioned between cutlery atop a placemat showing scenes of Native Americans and white colonizers. Further from the camera, occupying a central position at the top of the frame, is a smaller plate upon which sits a bowl holding half a cantaloupe. To the right are a salt shaker and a pepper shaker, a glass of water with ice and a glass of milk. In the lower left corner, the tan acrylic of the seat below is visible. SS: Not necessarily, and when I said I didn’t have a problem editing down, I meant I didn’t feel an obligation to include everything. There’s a lot of work, and the current edition has grown out of looking at some of the pictures that didn’t make it into the previous edition. There were a lot of pictures in the original show in ‘72 that were not included in the previous Phaidon edition of American Surfaces. When The Museum of Modern Art gave me my retrospective in 2017, the curator of the show, Quentin Bajac, wanted to recreate the American Surfaces show. I continued for about half a year photographing for the project after the show went up so Quentin could avail himself of the entire body of work. We decided to expand the original Phaidon book to include those. If this formalism looks forward to the more obsessive serialism of his American Surfaces, where he photographed the food he ate every day and the details of the bland motel rooms he stayed in, there are also street photographs that betray the influence of Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank. A dog in a window next to a huge Stars and Stripes is, at first glance, pure Frank – but there is something more seemingly casual about Shore’s eye.

These projects led to American Surfaces, where he set out to fully explore the main medium of vernacular photography: the color snapshot. “The word I used then for myself was ‘natural,’” Shore said. “I wanted to make pictures that felt natural, that felt like seeing, that didn’t feel like taking something in the world and making a piece of art out of it.”In the third and final part of our interview with the photographer, he talks about some of the people in the book, rediscovering new/old photos and his favourite shot In 1972 a then twenty-four year old Stephen Shore began a series of road trips across the United States, setting out to photograph the country that he had not previously had much direct exposure to, having seldom left the city of New York where he had been raised. Prone to the lures of nostalgia and custom as a photographer taking such a trip might otherwise be, Shore had been galvanized for this highly self-conscious investigation of the American vernacular by having spent several of his teenage years hanging around no less a cultural initiator than Andy Warhol’s Factory. In time—quite specfically in retrospect, it should be noted—the culled results of several trips made between 1972 and 1974 became a discursive series that Shore called American Surfaces. It’s the bane of my existence that I see photography not as a way of recording personal experience particularly, but as this process of exploring the world and the medium,” Shore told me in his studio. “I have to be reminded, “’It’s your son’s birthday party. Bring a camera.’ And then, when I’m there, ‘Take a picture,’ because it doesn’t occur to me to use it as this memorializing thing.” 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. There was a time though that something else changed. When you put an 8×10 camera on a tripod, the decisions a photographer makes become very clear and conscious. There is a period of awareness, of self-consciousness, of decisions […] I felt like I could take a picture that really felt “natural,” or that you were less aware of the mediation, that was harder to achieve when I started using the view camera because of the self-consciousness of the decisions. Over time, I very slowly examined each of the decisions involved in putting a picture together, and played with it, and tried to learn how to do it so that I could eventually get to the point of very consciously taking a picture that had much of the same quality that American Surfaces had, except doing it with this great big camera.”