Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places: The Complete Works

Product Information

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.’ Surprisingly, Shore chose to edit out most of the photographs that alluded to the initial influence ‘American Surfaces’, and the underlying autobiographical nature of his work. Other than several seemingly incongruous images-such as a stunning portrait of the photographer’s wife, or a extremely frank still-life of his pancake breakfast-Shore chose a set of photographs that coolly focused on the American landscape, and its transformation at the hands of twentieth-century consumer culture. Domineering edifices loom high within these photographs, invasive roads often divide the frame; oversized billboards fill the skies, and brightly colored cars roam freely throughout the land. From Shore’s point of view, even the seemingly irrepressible grandeur of Yosemite-so famously celebrated and romanticized in the photographs of Ansel Adams-had been humbled by families of pale, invasive tourists. Shore's images are structured around the experience of seeing, seeking to communicate the way in which the everyday might register to an outsider. He has regularly used his work as a form of visual diary, communicating his own experiences through his photographs. Shore's photographic choices suggest emotional states to the audience, often drawing power through the ways in which light and composition evoke feelings that the viewer cannot name.

Shore has spoken of his interest, across Uncommon Places, in prompting a deeper consideration of the quotidian through joining form with content so as to lose neither the image nor the complexities of North American life. Shore's subject is, as a diner breakfast, found across the United States whilst also, through the detailing of the plate and placemat, being specific to the place in which this example has been found. The references to Native American culture introduce an element of ambivalence to the photograph; they speak not only of the comforts of everyday life, but also of the myths upon which the United States has been built and the ways in which quotidian imagery serves to perpetuate these myths. Shore then embarked on a series of cross-country road 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 hand-held camera and then a 4×5" view camera before finally settling on the 8×10 format. [6] [10] The change to a large format camera is believed to have happened because of a conversation with John Szarkowski. [10] In 1974 a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant funded further work, [11] followed in 1975 by a Guggenheim Fellowship. [2] The Cultural Award of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh)". Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie . Retrieved 1 April 2014. 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."FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/16/2015 Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places, The Complete Works "Trail’s End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973" is one of the most iconic images from one of the most iconic photobooks of the twentieth century. Originally published by Aperture in 1982, Stephen Shore's celebrated Uncommon Places has been published this year in an expanded new Aperture edition featuring 20 new plates, gorgeously printed and impeccably sequenced. "On any list of must-own photo books," Details writes, "Stephen Shore's 1982 classic, Uncommon Places, deserves pride of place." We couldn't agree more. It's at the center of our 2015 Holiday Gift Guide for Photo Collectors. continue to blog 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. Shirey, David L. (February 24, 1971). "Prints and Photographs on view at Metropolitan" (PDF). The New York Times. Ginger Shore, Causeway Inn, Tampa, Florida, November 17, 1977 is indicative of the way in which Shore's work in Uncommon Places developed over the course of the 1970s. This image, taken with an 8 x 10 view camera, is from near the chronological and sequenced end of the series. The image is highly saturated and two-thirds of the picture plane is encompassed by a turquoise swimming pool, patterned with light. This photograph is dominated by diagonals; a silver railing in the foreground leads the swimmer into the pool and the viewer into the image, while the edge of the pool cuts diagonally toward the top of the image, separating a receding set of lounge chairs and another body of water. At the centre of the image is a woman, with wet hair, standing in the pool, looking away from the camera, dressed in a royal blue bathing suit.

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? 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?” Digital photography allowed Shore to return to reclaim some of the casualness and immediacy of American Surfaces without sacrificing the image quality of Uncommon Places. “Cameras are now made that are the size of a 35 mm SLR that can take a picture that has the resolution of a view camera,” he said. “And so that camera that I was looking for in 1972? By 2008 that camera was being made.” 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.”

Stephen Shore. Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California, August 13, 1979 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.

In recent years, there has been a massive resurgence of interest in color photography’s pioneers, culminating in many high-profile exhibitions, and the reissuing of seminal books that have long been out of print, such as William Eggleston’s Guide. Last spring, Andrew Hiller-an up-and-coming editor at Aperture-approached Shore with an offer to not only reissue Uncommon Places, but to publish the work in its entirety, as Shore had always intended. Shore was elated, and for months, he and Hiller poured over thousands of long-forgotten negatives, attempting to recover the complexity of the original project. Along with the original forty plates, they eventually agreed to include nearly one-hundred additional photographs, some of which had never even been printed by Shore in the first place, let alone been seen by a wider audience. Finally, more than thirty years after the project was first embarked upon, Uncommon Places: The Complete Works is due to be released, in May 2004. The Velvet Years, Andy Warhol's Factory, 1965–1967. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1995. ISBN 978-1857933239. 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. Shore's photographic work and professional success was undoubtedly informed and assisted by his friendships with many significant postwar artists. His relationships at the Factory, MoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum had developed into a network that included Ed Ruscha, Dennis Oppenheim, Christo and Jean-Claude, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander.Yet, despite the importance of the original Uncommon Places, its forty plates offered a very limited look at the scope of Shore’s overall accomplishment during a remarkably prolific nine-year period. When one looks at the book carefully, and with the diversity of the entire project in mind, one gets the distinct sense that something has been left out; or to be more accurate, that these forty photographs represent only the tip of an iceberg.

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.” 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. In 1972, you chose to present “American Surfaces” unmatted, unframed, and taped to the wall—very Warholian. The approach was met with a scathing reception, but today that sort of casualness seems intrinsic to how we consume images. Do you think people have changed their way of seeing? 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. 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, .Stephen Shore (born October 8, 1947) is an American photographer known for his images of scenes and objects of the banal, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. [1] His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s. [1]