Stephen Shore

Walker Evans and the Factory: Questioning Method After Early Success

At ten, Shore encountered Walker Evans’s American Photographs and learned how signs, storefronts, and cars could describe an era^*15. MoMA purchased three of his photographs when he was fourteen^*15. In 1971, at twenty-three, he became the first living photographer to receive a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art^*17. Despite this early recognition, Shore has said that once a method hardens into habit, he moves in another direction^*15. At Andy Warhol’s Factory, which he frequented from about 1965 to 1967, he watched decisions accumulate through changes in color and printing. The experience taught him to revise procedures and renew the question instead of repeating a finished style^*3.

Conceptual Art: Rules for Suspending His Own Composition

Conceptual art gave Shore a way to suspend the compositional fluency he had already acquired and examine how it organized a scene into a familiar photograph^*14. The serial structures, repetition, and predetermined procedures he encountered in John Coplans’s Serial Imagery and around John Gibson Gallery constrained his preferences for what counted as a “good subject” before he exposed the film. In Avenue of the Americas, June 17, 1970, he fixed only one condition—facing north from the beginning of each block—while pedestrians and the moment of exposure were left to the contingencies of the street^*4. Reducing his choices allowed differences among buildings, the positions of passersby, and shifts in light to remain visible without being absorbed into the effect of an accomplished composition.

All the Meat You Can Eat: From Photographic Use to Color

For the 1971 exhibition All the Meat You Can Eat, Shore placed postcards, police photographs, advertisements, pornography, and family snapshots in the same room^*22. He was examining how a photograph’s meaning changes when it functions as a snapshot, advertisement, or artwork, as well as the divide between an increasingly color-saturated everyday image world and an art photography culture still governed by black and white^*22. In Greeting from Amarillo, “Tall in Texas,” made the same year, he turned hospitals, courthouses, and restaurants into postcards and distributed them by slipping them into retail racks around the country^*23. A photograph’s meaning changes with its printing, purpose, and site of circulation. The commercial prints and grid installation of American Surfaces transferred this concern to the record of a journey.

Eggleston, Meyerowitz, and Baltz: Photographing Postwar Everyday Life

In the 1960s, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander addressed the present through a “social landscape” of advertisements, television, and chance juxtapositions^*12. During the 1970s, William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Shore, and others photographed the ordinary colors of lived environments^*20. Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, meanwhile, described altered landscapes through measured distance and serial form^*19. They shared a concern: how to represent everyday life shaped by automobile travel, mass consumption, and suburban development through form, color, distance, and repetition, without relying on dramatic events. Shore joined this task to the record of travel and to an examination of his own way of seeing.

The History of Road Photography and an Unfamiliar America

American road photography already had Evans’s American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans as precedents. David Campany notes that Evans arranged photographs made on journeys into a response to the country as a whole^*16. Shore knew little of the United States beyond New York and later described himself as partly an outsider while making the work^*14. American Surfaces turned from landmarks to meals, beds, toilets, televisions, and road signs, recording America through the recurring units of life in transit^*6. Travel became both a way to encounter unfamiliar places and a condition for seeing outside familiar compositional habits.

American Surfaces: Recording Where the Eye Comes to Rest

In American Surfaces, Shore tried to record where his eye came to rest, his distance from the subject, and the sequence of his gaze before sorting daily life into meaningful scenes. He repeatedly photographed meals, people, television sets, motels, and towns he passed through, placing a cultural portrait of travel and a record of visual attention within the same series^*5. At unexpected moments, he practiced mentally freezing his field of vision and noticing what he was looking at and from what distance^*15. The small camera reduced the time available to finish a composition, bringing visual response and the decision to expose closer together. Shore’s description of his goal as photographs that “feel like seeing” captures this effort to approach ordinary vision while remaining aware that the snapshot carries its own conventions^*13.

Commercial Prints and Remaking: The Unstable Color of American Surfaces

Early presentations of American Surfaces placed small color prints processed by Kodak on the wall in a three-tier grid, without frames, mats, or glass^*7. By keeping meals, people, beds, roads, and buildings at the same scale, the grid resisted isolating a single image as a masterpiece and made the duration of the journey emerge through repetition. The Met holds 229 prints produced in 1972–73 as a single work^*8. Lisa Muzzin’s study traces the series as it was remade through small prints, photobooks, and later digital chromogenic prints^*26. Changes in processing, paper, scale, and printing alter the color and surface of the same negatives. While the work records the 1970s, it also raises the question of how that past is reproduced in color for later audiences.

Why Color? Keeping Color in the Record of Postwar Life

By around 1971, television, film, magazines, advertising, and much family photography had moved to color, making black and white an increasingly deliberate aesthetic choice^*22. Shore used color to retain wallpaper, food, television screens, cars, signs, pavement, building materials, and artificial light. Color conveys the date of a product, the character of a material, the use of a place, and the condition of light. In American Surfaces, it preserves the texture of life on the road; in Uncommon Places, fields of color in sky, pavement, buildings, and signs lead the eye from foreground to distance. The Met places Shore and Eggleston within a new documentary tradition because color carries the atmosphere and character of modern life^*12.

From 35mm to 8×10: Holding the Built Environment in a Single Frame

The small camera used for American Surfaces preserved quick reactions in transit, yet made it harder to hold the relationships among roads, buildings, signs, cars, and sky within one image. Shore began using a 4×5-inch camera in 1973 and moved to 8×10 after the tripod became central to his process^*2. Composing on the ground glass allowed him to organize a space in which attention could move from pavement to cars, signs, buildings, and the distance. Road width, the setback of storefronts, parking lots, signs, and standardized building materials reveal a town designed around automobile travel and consumption. The large-format camera preserved the relationships created by these arrangements; increased detail was secondary.

Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue: Questioning Learned Perspective

In Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, lanes, signs, storefronts, cars, and sky pull the eye in several directions across the frame^*10. Shore later wrote that his first photograph forced the disorderly intersection into one-point perspective. Recognizing that he had imposed a learned order on the scene, he returned the next day to search for a structure arising from his experience of the place^*21. Shore’s idea of clarity encompassed sharp focus and the organization of space through light, color, and camera position^*9. Form had to show road markings, routes into stores, advertising, and building materials interfering with one another without resolving them into a conventional perspective.

Signs of Life: Reading Signs, Architecture, and Car Culture as an Urban Language

In 1975, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown commissioned Shore to photograph architecture from Los Angeles to New York for Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City, a Smithsonian exhibition organized with Steven Izenour^*24. Shore explained that although a society’s values cannot themselves be photographed, their effects can be recorded as alterations, signs, parking lots, and facades^*24. Olivier Lugon has analyzed the exhibition’s enormous photomurals as an early precedent for the later display of large-scale photographs^*25. The intersections and commercial buildings in Uncommon Places similarly show how signs and architecture, designed to be recognized from a car, direct vision and movement.

How the Photobook Organizes Itinerary and Formal Change

The title Uncommon Places was attached when the book was published in 1982; it had not been the name of the project while Shore was photographing^*14. The first edition selected many buildings and intersections while excluding interiors, people, and television sets, and Shore later felt that this edit narrowed the scope of the work^*2. The expanded edition restored groupings from individual journeys and a broader range of subjects, organizing the temporal shift from the quick response associated with 35mm to the more structural work of the view camera. Place names and dates in works such as U.S. 93, Kingman, Arizona, July 2, 1975 and Room 115, Holiday Inn, Belle Glade, Florida, November 14, 1977 connect ostensibly typical views to a personal itinerary^*11. The photobook presents an America that does not resolve into a single emblem and traces how the photographer’s way of seeing changed in motion.

The Light Gallery Debate: Why Commercial Prints Provoked Resistance

When American Surfaces was shown at Light Gallery in 1972, its small color photographs, centrally placed meals and beds, and unframed grid collided with the gallery’s culture of black-and-white fine prints. Shore recalls that the exhibition violated nearly every rule governing the content and presentation of art photography and was harshly reviewed^*7. Large prints made by specialists, mats, frames, signatures, and individual sales established scarcity and value; Kodak processing, sale as a group, and small photographs taped to the wall foregrounded sequence and circulation over the value of the individual print. The choice carried additional critical force because Shore had held a solo exhibition at the Met the previous year^*17.

New Color and New Topographics: Shore’s Place in Photographic History

New Color photographed advertisements, cars, interiors, and streets in the ordinary colors of lived experience, establishing color as a central method of art photography^*12. New Topographics used measured distance and serial form to describe developed land without shaping it into an emotional climax^*19. The 1975 exhibition shifted the center of landscape photography from sublime nature toward industrial sites, suburbs, and ordinary built environments^*19. Shore connected both tendencies to the experience of a traveler and to the ways photographs circulate. Color, travel, seriality, and the large-format camera allowed him to show how consumption and automobile travel shape vision through recurring subjects and the arrangement of roads and buildings.

Steel Town: Recording Industrial Decline in a Restrained Frame

In 1977, Shore photographed factories, towns, and workers in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, where steel mills were closing, for Fortune’s assignment “Hard Times Come to Steeltown”^*27. He has explained that foregrounding a political position could simplify the complexity of reality, while also acknowledging that he was alert to the political consequences of cultural phenomena in Uncommon Places^*27. The clarity of large-format color places the scale of factories, empty streets, bars, houses, and workers within the same historical moment. His later description of himself as a material witness to history also indicates that formal restraint did not mean indifference to social life^*15. By preserving the details of place before supplying an explanation, the photographs became records through which the connection between industry and daily life could be reread over time.

Luzzara and Later Work: Refusing to Reduce a Place to a Representative Story

In 1993, Shore visited Luzzara, Italy, where Paul Strand had made Un Paese about forty years earlier, and photographed residents, streets, squares, and the surrounding landscape^*28. David Campany observes that Strand connects people and objects to symbols of a community, while Shore photographs time between events and does not organize people as characters in a social drama^*29. His method continued beyond the United States of the 1970s: it preserved the coexistence of people, buildings, and roads before drawing them into a representative story of place. Shore subsequently moved among photobooks, digital printing, and social media, testing how equipment and circulation alter the speed of attention, distance, and the amount of information in an image^*1. In The Nature of Photographs, he separates the photograph’s physical and formal attributes and describes the conditions through which a subject is transformed into a photograph^*18. Across these changes of format, he kept asking how the eye moves between objects, where it stops, and from what distance it sees.