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. 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. O'Neill, Claire (February24, 2010). " The Crusade For Color Photography". The Picture Show (photo stories from NPR). NPR. npr.org. Retrieved 17February 2018. 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. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004; New York: Aperture, 2004. ISBN 978-1597113038.

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. Stephen Shore: Retrospective". C/O Berlin. co-berlin.org. Exhibition February6– May22, 2016. Retrieved 22February 2018. The New Color Photography. New York: Abbeville, 1981. ISBN 978-0896591967. Text by Sally Eauclaire. 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 recent years, Shore has been working in Israel, the West Bank, and Ukraine. [18] Publications [ edit ] Publications by Shore [ edit ]

Shore was born in New York City in 1947, the sole son of Jewish parents who ran a handbag company. At the age of six, he began to develop his family’s photos with a dark-room kit his uncle had given him as a present. He received his first camera a couple years later, and when he was ten he received a copy of Walker Evans’ American Photographs. 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. 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] 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. Intent on exploring both the country, and photography itself, through the eyes of an everyday tourist, Shore elected to record the trip on 35mm color film, and brought along his Rollei 35, an early precursor to the ‘point-and-shoot’ cameras of today. He entitled the project ‘American Surfaces’, literally emphasizing the superficial nature of both his brief encounters whilst on the road, and the underlying character of the images that he hoped to produce. With such an easy-to-use camera at hand, Shore photographed relentlessly. ‘In American Surfaces, I was photographing almost every meal I ate, every person I met, every waiter or waitress who served me, every bed I slept in, every toilet I used. But also, I was photographing streets I was driving through, buildings I would see. I would just pull over and say, ‘Okay, this is a picture I want.”

The change was not a deliberate stylistic overhaul but a natural response to the technical differences of the large-format camera. 8x10 color is, Shore said, “the most cumbersome and expensive photographic process possible.” As a result, he had to be much more mindful of when and why he took a picture. What is it like to have eyes? Or to be conscious of our uses of them? I think our ideal way with art is 1) to see, 2) to look, and 3) to really see. How does that unfold? It’s an unexpected statement coming from the man who made American Surfaces. But then American Surfaces was not the random result of some photographic compulsion: Shore conceived of and executed it as a disciplined artistic undertaking. “I think there may have been a slight difference,” Shore said about the symmetry between these photos and social-media photography. “When people are posting, I actually find it a little peculiar. Why would they think that I would be curious what they had for breakfast? But this was more a way of using my own experience as—it was about me, but it was also about exploring the culture through this mechanism [the snapshot].”Together, they amounted to a new topography of the vernacular American landscape, his style in places approximating what came to be known as the snapshot aesthetic, in other places adhering to a detached, almost neutral formalism that only added to the deadpan everydayness of his images. Shore later described his democratic approach thus: “To see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognise it as a photographic possibility – that’s what I’m interested in.” Though dismissed at the time by many critics, his style has been enduringly influential and he is now recognised as one of the greatest living photographers. Stephen Shore: Survey. Madrid: Fundación Mapfre, 2014. ISBN 978-1597113090. With an interview between David Campany and Shore, and texts by Marta Dahó, Sandra S. Phillips, and Horacio Fernández. 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.’ 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. Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore's legendary Uncommon Placeshas 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 Surfacesand Amarillo: Tall in Texas.