Stephen Shore: American Surfaces (Revised and Expanded Edition)

Phaidon's 2020 revised and expanded edition of Stephen Shore's American Surfaces is the road-trip diary of snapshot-format color photographs Shore made across the United States in 1972 and first exhibited that same year, when critics largely dismissed the work. It is now regarded as a founding document of American color photography.

Travelling by car with a 35mm rangefinder, Shore photographed diner meals, motel rooms, gas station forecourts, and the people he met along the way. He printed the results as uniform drugstore-format color prints. He pinned them to the wall salon-style at his 1972 show at Light Gallery, a presentation critics of the time read as amateurish rather than considered. This 256-page edition restores and expands the original sequence with previously unpublished images. It positions the project as the direct precursor to Uncommon Places and to Shore's large-format color work of the later 1970s.

Shore, born in New York in 1947, moved from the vernacular immediacy of American Surfaces to the deliberate, large-format compositions of Uncommon Places within a few years. He has taught photography at Bard College since 1982. The library also holds Aperture's Selected Works, 1973-1981, a multi-contributor survey drawn from the same archive of negatives that American Surfaces and Uncommon Places came from.