Photography-Now - International Fine Art Photography Index

Also see the "Stephen Shore Rephotographed Project ".

Stephen Shore
American. born 1947

Stephen Shore (born in New York City) is an American photographer known for his deadpan images of banal scenes and objects in the United States, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography.

Stephen Shore was interested in photography from an early age. Self-taught, he received a photographic darkroom kit at age six. He began to use a 35mm camera three years later and made his first color photographs. At ten he received a copy of Walker Evans's book, American Photographs, which influenced him greatly. His career began at the early age of fourteen, when he made the precocious move of presenting his photographs to Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Recognizing Shore's talent, Steichen bought three of his works. At age seventeen, Shore met Andy Warhol and began to frequent Warhol's studio, the Factory, photographing Warhol and the creative people that surrounded him. In 1971, at the age of 24, Shore became the second living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Shore then embarked on a series of cross-country trips, making "on the road" photographs of American and Canadian landscapes. In 1972, he made the journey from Manhattan to Amarillo, Texas that provoked his interest in colour photography. Viewing the streets and towns he passed through, he conceived the idea to photograph them in color, first using 35mm and then an 8x10" view camera. In 1974 an NEA endowment funded further work, followed in 1975 by a Guggenheim grant and in 1976 a color show at MoMA, NY. His 1982 book, Uncommon Places was a bible for the new color photographers because, alongside William Eggleston, his work proved that a color photograph, like a painting or even a black and white photograph, could be considered a work of art. Many artists, including Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Martin Parr, Joel Sternfeld , and Thomas Struth, have acknowledged his influence on their work.

Books of his photographs include Uncommon Places; Uncommon Places: 50 Unpublished Photographs; Essex County; The Gardens at Giverny; Stephen Shore: Photographs 1973 - 1993; and The Velvet Years, Andy Warhol's Factory, 1965 - 1967. In 1998, Johns Hopkins University Press published The Nature of Photographs, a book he wrote about how photographs function visually (reprinted in an expanded edition by Phaidon Press). Most recently, Aperture has published Uncommon Places: The Complete Work and Phaidon has published American Surfaces.

Shore's ability to react to fluid situations and translate the spontaneity unique to them into an image, using the heavy, difficult-to-set-up plate camera is seen in another photograph, one that has an apparently more confused structure. In El Paso Street, El Paso, Texas, July 5, 1975, he again selects a viewpoint facing a clear vertical, the back of a man waiting on the curb, thus initially giving the observer's gaze a fixed direction. On the sunlit island of sidewalk jutting into the foreground of the picture from two directions, there is a network of objects and their shadows from which individual aspects nevertheless seem to radiate, apparently autonomously: the tree that seems to have been placed on top of the concrete, and, to the right of it, an assembly of street signs (with the helmeted head at the center), which takes on its own values in terms of direction, surface, and color - values that may seem detached from the real spatial context of the picture. In general, in fact, the advertising and traffic signs in this picture are potentially released from their normal indicative character as graphics. They give the picture an ordered structure and a dynamic quality to the same degree that they momentarily step out of their context.

Since he started taking color shots, Shore has exclusively produced contact prints of the negatives, which since 1974 have measured 8 x 10 inches (ca. 20 x 25 cm). No enlargement is involved, therefore, and the greatest possible directness is achieved in the relation between the negative and the print. Precisely against the background of the large-sized reproductions that have become common in international photography in recent years, it is well worth emphasizing the advantages of the contact print, as Shore uses it. Its relatively small format gives it the appearance of being a concise visual impression, in which a wealth of detail can nevertheless be perceived, and which invites the observer to read the image, to engage in a progressive process of understanding the individual elements it contains and the connections between them. The contact print gives the picture an extraordinary formal differentiation and a special succinctness in its use of color... The contact print, as Shore sees it, undoubtedly gives the photographic image a quality of aura that no enlargement can achieve. His pictures therefore have a special presence, in which the sensual conciseness is equally charged with an intellectual and spiritual force.

Shore's understanding of color is an unmistakable part of the peculiar, special quality that his pictures have. He shares a preference for the obvious - taking color and as it were saturating it with reality - with other artists belonging to the "second generation of color photographers," which emerged at the beginning of the 1970s. Color no longer has a decorative status, but is conceived instead as a natural quality of everyday experience. Shore, however, manages above and beyond this to shape color into an entirely personal form of expression. Natural light stimulates the whole of the space in his pictures, and does not appear to be a special phenomenon in itself that is being used in an attempt to dramatize the formal structure. Shadow formations, when they appear, have a quite incidental quality, and in no way seek to emancipate themselves and become independent constructions. Shore usually registers sunlight entering from the side, and this also explains the specially saturated quality that the light has in his work. Color is really a quality of the light for him. This subdues any potential tendency for the color to become harsh; and equally, the light itself in this way acquires a special delicacy. The light is absorbed into the colored materiality of objects, and charges them with a restrained glow. The impression arises that color has been spiritualized; it constantly appears to be felt, at every point. And this explains the sudden change often observed when the pictures are studied for a longer period, when the color becomes an independent construct, although without disturbing the unity of the image. Above all, however, the image's saturation with reality in Shore's work arises from the color; it is the color that provides the vital connection with the world...

Shore then embarked on a series of cross-country trips, making "on the road" photographs of American and Canadian landscapes. In 1972, he made the journey from Manhattan to Amarillo, Texas, that provoked his interest in color photography. Viewing the streets and towns he passed through, he conceived the idea to photograph them in color, first using 35mm and then an 4x5" view camera before finally settling on the 8x10 format. In 1974 an NEA endowment funded further work, followed in 1975 by a Guggenheim grant and in 1976 a color show at MoMA, NY. His 1982 book, Uncommon Places was a bible for the new color photographers because, alongside William Eggleston, his work proved that a color photograph, like a painting or even a black and white photograph, could be considered a work of art. Many artists, including Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Martin Parr, Joel Sternfeld , and Thomas Struth, have acknowledged his influence on their work.

ARTINFO’s Philip Gefter notes that Stephen Shore as well as William Eggleston borrowed from photorealist painters, such as Robert Cottingham, Richard Estes and Ralph Goings. Gefter notes, “[Shore and Egglestone’s] interpretation of the American vernacular—gas stations, diners, parking lots—is foretold in photorealist paintings that preceded their pictures.” ^[2]

Books of his photographs include Uncommon Places: 50 Unpublished Photographs; Essex County; The Gardens at Giverny; Stephen Shore: Photographs 1973 - 1993; and The Velvet Years, Andy Warhol's Factory, 1965 - 1967. In 1998, Johns Hopkins University Press published The Nature of Photographs, a book Shore wrote about how photographs function (reprinted in an expanded edition by Phaidon Press). Most recently, Aperture has published Uncommon Places: The Complete Work, and Phaidon has published American Surfaces.

Shore is represented by 303 Gallery in New York; Sprüth Magers in Cologne, Munich, and London; and Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels.

Currently Shore is the director of the photography department at Bard College, a position he has held since 1982.