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. His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.
In 1975 Shore received a Guggenheim Fellowship. 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. 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 which helped to define the New Topographics genre.
In 1976 he had a solo exhibition of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2010 he received an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society. Shore has been the director of the photography department at Bard College since 1982.
Life and work Early years Shore was born as sole son of Jewish parents who ran a handbag company.Crair, Ben (October 22, 2013). "'Then I Found Myself Seeing Pictures All the Time': Stephen Shore's photos will make you put away your camera phone". The New Republic. newrepublic.com. Retrieved 22 February 2018. 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.Interview with Stephen Shore . Wallpaper*, July 26, 2007. 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. 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."Ways of Making Pictures. Interview with David Campany." In: Mapfre 2014, p. 24.
In 1965, at the age of seventeen, 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." 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' Serial ImageryJohn Coplans, Shirley Hopps: Jawlensky and the Serial Image. Exhibition catalogue. Irvine and Riverside: University of California, 1966. . 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 in 1971 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, making him the first living photographer to be exhibited there."Ways of Making Pictures." Interview with David Campany. In: Mapfre 2014, p. 25ff; ill. on p. 70ff.
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. 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.
Uncommon Places The change to a large format camera is believed to have happened because of a conversation with John Szarkowski. In 1974 a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant funded further work, followed in 1975 by a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Along with others, especially William Eggleston, Shore is recognized as one of the leading photographers who established color photography as an art form.Frankel, David (December 2014). "Stephen Shore, 303 Gallery." Artforum. Vol. 53, no. 4. p. 304. "With William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, and others, Stephen Shore was one of those who established color photography as an important aesthetic medium in the 1970s."O'Neill, Claire (February 24, 2010). "The Crusade for Color Photography". The Picture Show (photo stories from NPR). NPR. npr.org. Retrieved 17 February 2018.Anglès, Daphné (February 8, 2013). "Full Spectrum of a Photographer Who Made Color Cool". IHT Rendez-vous (blog). New York Times. nytimes.com. Retrieved 17 February 2018. His book Uncommon Places (1982) was influential for new color photographers of his own and later generations. Photographers who have acknowledged his influence on their work include Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Martin Parr, Joel Sternfeld and Thomas Struth.
Other work Shore photographed fashion stories for Another Magazine, Elle, Daily Telegraph and many others.Reuel Golden (December 1, 2010), A Shore thing W.
Legacy In 2026, more than 800 photographs from Shore's Uncommon Places series were gifted to Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada. The VAG now has one of the largest museum collections of photographer Stephen Shore’s work in the world.
Awards
1974: National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. 1975: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 2010: Royal Photographic Society Honorary Fellowship."Honorary Fellowships (HonFRPS) ". Royal Photographic Society. Accessed 22 February 2018 2010: Culture Award, German Society for Photography (DGPh), Germany.
Exhibitions Solo exhibitions 1971: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City 1972: Light Gallery, New York City. The first exhibition of his American Surfaces photographs. Further solo shows in 1973, 1975 (stereo photographs), 1977, 1978 and 1980. 1976: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City 1977: Rencontres d'Arles, Arles, France1977 edition on the homepage of Rencontres d'Arles. Retrieved 2024-01-20. 1981: Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL, subsequently at Museum of Arts and Sciences, Daytona Beach, and (1982) Polk Public Museum, Lakeland, FL 1981: Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco 1982: ARCO Center for Visual Art, Los Angeles 1983: Pace/McGill Gallery, New York City (subsequent show in 1989) 1984: Art Institute of Chicago 1985: Center for Creative Photography, Tucson 1994: Fotografien 1973 bis 1993, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Amerika Haus Berlin, and George Eastman House, Rochester, NY 1999: American Surfaces 1972, SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne, and Fotografie Forum international, Frankfurt/Main 2011: Abu Dhabi, Aspen Art Museum 2012: Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow 2014: Stephen Shore: Survey, Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, subsequently at Rencontres d'Arles, ArlesStephen Shore show at the 2015 edition of the Rencontres d'Arles. Retrieved 2024-01-20. 2016: Stephen Shore. Retrospective, C/O Berlin, Berlin"Stephen Shore: Retrospective". C/O Berlin. co-berlin.org. Exhibition February 6 – May 22, 2016. Retrieved 22 February 2018. 2017–2018: Stephen Shore, Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Group exhibitions 1968: Andy Warhol. Photographs by Stephen Shore and Billy Name, Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Curated by Kasper König 1973: Landscape/Cityscape, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1975: New Topographics, George Eastman House, RochesterCatalogue: New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Edited by William Jenkins. Rochester, NY: International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, 1975. 2009–2012: New Topographics, George Eastman House, Rochester, and Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. Further stops in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Linz (Austria), Cologne (Germany), Rotterdam (The Netherlands), and Bilbao (Spain)
Publications Photo books, monographs and solo exhibition catalogues Stephen Shore: Photographs. Sarasota, Fl: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 1981. Interview with Stephen Shore by Michael Auping. Uncommon Places. New York: Aperture, 1982. . The Gardens at Giverny: A View of Monet's World. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1983 (repr. 2005). ISBN 0-89381-113-0. Luzzara. Museo Nazionale delle Arti Naives "Cesare Zavattini" di Luzzara. Rubiera (Reggio Emilia): Arcadia Ed., 1993. . "Companion volume" to Paul Strand's Un Paese from 1953. Fotografien 1973 bis 1993. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1994. ISBN 3-925047-32-8 (in German). Catalogue accompanying the first retrospective exhibition which travelled through Germany, edited by Heinz Liesbrock, texts by Liesbrock, James Enyeart and Thomas Weski, and a conversation by Liesbrock with Bernd and Hilla Becher. Photographs 1973–1993. Munich: Schirmer Art Books, 1998. . English edition for the George Eastman House, Rochester, the only venue outside Germany. The Velvet Years. Andy Warhol's Factory, 1965–67. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1995. ISBN 1-56025-098-4. Text by Lynne Tyllman. American Surfaces 1972. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1999. . Edited by Shore, sequence of 77 photographs. Uncommon Places: 50 Unpublished Photographs. Düsseldorf: Galerie Conrads, and Paris: Ed. Mennour, 2002. . Text by Gerry Badger and Shore. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works. New York: Aperture, and London: Thames & Hudson, 2004. . Updated 2nd printing in 2015 with 20 additional photographs and statement. American Surfaces. London: Phaidon, 2005 (reprinted 2008, 2011, 2013). . Edition with 312 photographs, an introduction by Bob Nickas and captions. New revised and expanded edition: 2020. ISBN 978-1-83866-137-3. Essex County. Portland, OR: Nazraeli Press, 2006. . One Picture Book #43: Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California 8/13/79. Portland, OR: Nazraeli Press, 2007. . A Road Trip Journal. London: Phaidon, 2008. . Limited edition, numbered and signed. Stephen Shore. Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 2010. . Text by Mark Haworth-Booth. Emirati Expressions. Abu Dhabi: Tourism & Culture Authority, 2011. ISBN 9948-16-293-5. Result of four months of workshops in 2009. Exhibition catalogue a. o. with a portfolio of 50 images taken by Shore in Abu Dhabi. Mose: A Preliminary Report. Cologne: Walther König, 2011. . Edited by Antonello Frongia and William Guerrieri. The Book of Books. London: Phaidon 2012. ISBN 978-0-7148-6086-2. Massive two-volume set in slipcase containing all 83 of Shore's print-on-demand books made between 2003 and 2008. Limited edition of 250 signed copies. Essay by Jeff Rosenheim. The Hudson Valley. Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Blind Spot Series, 2012. . Limited edition of 1000, edited by Dana Faconti, text by Laurie Dahlberg. One Picture Book #73: Pet Pictures. Portland, OR: Nazraeli Press, 2012. . From Galilee to the Negev. London: Phaidon, 2014. . Winslow Arizona. Tokyo: Amana, 2014. (English and Japanese). Series of pictures taken on a single day as part of Doug Aitken's Station to Station project. Stephen Shore: Survey. Madrid: Fundación Mapfre, and New York: Aperture, 2014. . Catalogue accompanying the first comprehensive retrospective, with an interview between David Campany and Shore, and texts by Marta Dahó, Sandra S. Phillips and Horacio Fernández. Survivors in Ukraine. London: Phaidon, 2015. . Essay by Jane Kramer. Instagram. London: Mörel, 2015. ISBN 978-1-907071-49-2. All images posted by Shore on Instagram up to this point, edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Limited edition of 200.