American photographer
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]
In 1975 Shore received a Guggenheim Fellowship.[2] In 1971, he was the first living photographer to be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where he had a solo show of black and white photographs.[3][4][5] He was selected to participate in the influential group exhibition "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape", at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York), in 1975-1976.
In 1976 he had a solo exhibition of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art.[6] In 2010 he received an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society.[7]
Life and work
Early years
Shore was born as sole son of Jewish parents who ran a handbag company.[8] He was interested in photography from an early age. Self-taught, he received a Kodak Junior darkroom set for his sixth birthday from a forward-thinking uncle.[4][9] He began to use a 35 mm camera three years later and made his first color photographs. At ten he got a copy of Walker Evans's book, American Photographs, which influenced him greatly.[4] At age fourteen, Shore naively contacted Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, if he would have a look at his photographs, and Steichen was kind enough to buy three black and white photographs of New York City.[4][6][10]
In 1965, at the age of sixteen, Shore began to frequent Andy Warhol's studio, the Factory, photographing Warhol and the people that surrounded him, on and off, for about three years. "I began to see conceptually there because that's how Andy looked at the world, finding this detached pleasure in the banality of everyday things."[4] His photographs of the Factory alongside those of Billy Name Kasper König selected for a documentary exhibition on Warhol at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 1968.
Through John Coplans' Jawlensky and the Serial Image[11] and by spending time at the John Gibson Gallery he got acquainted with conceptual works that used photography by Christo, Richard Long, Peter Hutchinson and Dennis Oppenheim.
His early conceptual sequences of black and white photographs originated in 1969 and 1970. They were shown at his first solo exhibition in1971 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, making him the first living photographer to be exhibited there.[12][4]
American Surfaces
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 35 mm hand-held camera and then a 4×5" view camera before finally settling on the 8×10 format.[6][13] The change to a large format camera is believed to have happened because of a conversation with John Szarkowski.[13] In 1974 a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant funded further work,[14] followed in 1975 by a Guggenheim Fellowship.[2]
Along with others, especially William Eggleston, Shore is recognized as one of the leading photographers who established color photography as an art form.[15][16][17] His book Uncommon Places (1982) was influential for new color photographers of his own and later generations.[18][1] Photographers who have acknowledged his influence on their work include Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Martin Parr, Joel Sternfeld and Thomas Struth.[citation needed]
Shore photographed fashion stories for Another Magazine, Elle, Daily Telegraph and many others.[19] Commissioned by Italian brand Bottega Veneta, he photographed socialite Lydia Hearst, filmmaker Liz Goldwyn and model Will Chalker for the brand's spring/summer 2006 advertisements.[citation needed]
Shore has been the director of the photography department at Bard College since 1982.[20][1]
His American Surfaces series, a travel diary made between 1972 and 1973 with photographs of "friends he met, meals he ate, toilets he sat on", was not published until 1999, then again in 2005.[4][6]
In recent years, Shore has been working in Israel, the West Bank, and Ukraine.[21]
