AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- American Surfaces and Uncommon Places, color pictures of everyday America in the 1970s
- Works in
- Color since 1972; black and white in his early work
- Camera
- Rollei 35 for American Surfaces; 4x5 and then 8x10 view cameras for Uncommon Places
- Also
- Photographed Andy Warhol’s Factory from 1965 to 1967; head of photography at Bard College since 1982
- Start with
- Uncommon Places: The Complete Works (Aperture, 2004)
- Links
Stephen Shore (born 1947) is an American photographer from New York. His color pictures of ordinary streets, motels, meals and gas stations, made on road trips in the 1970s, helped make color photography part of art. He has led the photography program at Bard College since 1982.
The story
In 1961 a fourteen-year-old boy in New York picked up the phone and called the Museum of Modern Art. He asked for Edward Steichen, the head of the photography department. “I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to do this,” Stephen Shore remembered. “So I just called him up and said, ‘I’d like to show you my work.’” Steichen bought three of his black-and-white pictures of the city.
Photography had started early for him. At six, an uncle gave him a darkroom set. At ten, he got a copy of Walker Evans’s book American Photographs. In 1965, at seventeen, he began photographing at Andy Warhol’s Factory, almost every day at first. Warhol never gave him advice, Shore later said. Watching Warhol make decisions taught him to think about aesthetics. In 1971 he became the first living photographer to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But he had seen very little of his own country. “Until I was twenty-three, I lived mostly in a few square miles in Manhattan,” he wrote in 1982. In 1972 a friend drove him to Amarillo, Texas. “I didn’t drive, so my first view of America was framed by the passenger’s window. It was a shock.”
So he went on the road again, this time alone, with a small Rollei 35 and color film, like a tourist. He photographed meals, beds, waitresses, toilets, streets and gas stations, and sent the film to Kodak for ordinary prints. One frame from Amarillo, Texas, July 1972, shows a small dog asleep with its nose against the base of a lamp. In the autumn of 1972 the Light Gallery in New York showed the prints in a grid on the wall, without frames. The series became American Surfaces.
The reviews were poor. Even the curator John Szarkowski asked whether the easy camera was doing the work. Shore wanted larger prints, but the small negatives were “just ridiculously grainy.” Therefore, from 1973, he went back on the road with a 4x5 camera, and later with a large 8x10 view camera on a tripod. The work became Uncommon Places, published by Aperture in 1982.
The boy who once called a museum without knowing the rules now chose every inch of the frame. “The view camera forces conscious decision making. You can’t sort of stand somewhere; it is exactly where you want to be,” he said.
The work
- 1947Born in New York City on October 8
- 1961Edward Steichen buys three of his photographs for MoMA
- 1965Starts photographing at Andy Warhol’s Factory
- 1971First living photographer with a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- 1972Road trip to Amarillo; begins American Surfaces
- 1975Guggenheim Fellowship; shown in New Topographics
- 1982Uncommon Places published; becomes head of photography at Bard College
- 2017Retrospective at MoMA, New York
- 2025Early Work, his teenage New York photographs, published by Mack
Lessons
Ask anyway. At fourteen, Shore called the head of photography at MoMA and asked to show his work. Steichen bought three prints.
Photograph the whole trip. For American Surfaces he photographed almost every meal, bed and person on the road, not only the beautiful views.
Let a slow camera teach you. The 8x10 view camera made him decide exactly where to stand before every picture.
Try this: on your next trip, photograph every meal you eat and every room you sleep in. Print the pictures small and pin them to a wall in a grid, the way Shore showed American Surfaces in 1972.
Gear
Rollei 35: a small 35mm camera, an early kind of point-and-shoot. He used it on the road for American Surfaces in 1972 and 1973, and Kodak labs made the prints.
4x5 camera: he started Uncommon Places in 1973 with a 4x5 press camera, because his 35mm film was too grainy for big prints.
8x10 view camera: the large camera on a tripod that he used for most of Uncommon Places, until 1981.
At Warhol’s Factory in the 1960s he worked with handheld 35mm cameras and no flash. Since 2014 he has posted much of his new work on Instagram.
Books
Uncommon Places: The Complete Works (Aperture, 2004). The first Uncommon Places came out in 1982 with only a small selection of the large-format color work Shore made on American roads between 1973 and 1981. This 188-page edition gathers the whole series: streets and crossroads, but also interiors and portraits. It adds about twenty images never printed before and a statement by Shore. It has an essay by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and a conversation between Shore and the writer Lynne Tillman about his methods and his roots in Pop and Conceptual art. The best first book for anyone who wants to see why this series changed color photography.
American Surfaces: Revised & Expanded Edition (Phaidon, 2020). The snapshots from Shore’s road trips of 1972 and 1973: meals, motel beds, people he met, streets and signs. The first Phaidon edition of 2005 had 320 photographs in the order they were taken. This 256-page edition adds previously unpublished pictures and a new introduction by the writer Teju Cole. A good book for photographers who keep a visual diary or work with small cameras and phones.
The Nature of Photographs: A Primer (Phaidon, 2007). First published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1998, then revised and redesigned by Phaidon. In 136 pages Shore explains how a photograph works, on a physical level, a depictive level (flatness, frame, time and focus) and a mental level. He uses examples of many kinds, from famous pictures to found snapshots. Written from his teaching, it is for students, teachers and anyone who wants to take or read photographs better.
Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography (Mack, 2022). A 224-page memoir that Mack calls an impressionistic scrapbook of more than fifty years of work. It mixes short essays, stories, photographs and lessons from his decades of teaching. For readers who want to build their own way of seeing and to notice small everyday moments.
In his words
“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.”
“Especially if I’m photographing an intersection, I don’t have to have a single point of emphasis in the picture. It can be complex, because it’s so detailed that the viewer can take time and read it; they can pay attention to a lot more.”
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