Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973-1981
A collaborative survey of Stephen Shore's negatives from 1973 to 1981, the years that produced American Surfaces and Uncommon Places, in which fifteen artists and critics each select and comment on ten images of their own choosing.
Over five years Shore scanned hundreds of negatives from this period. He invited fifteen artists and critics to each choose ten photographs and write on them: Wes Anderson, Quentin Bajac, David Campany, Paul Graham, Guido Guidi, Takashi Homma, An-My Lê, Michael Lesy, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Francine Prose, Ed Ruscha, Britt Salvesen, Taryn Simon, Thomas Struth and Lynne Tillman. The resulting 279-page volume, published by Aperture in 2017, is structured as fifteen distinct readings of a single body of work rather than a single curatorial narrative. It reveals how differently the same archive looks depending on who is looking.
Shore, born in New York in 1947, began photographing at age six and had work acquired by MoMA before he was twenty. The 1973-81 road trips recorded here fixed the vocabulary of color, banality and deadpan composition that made Uncommon Places a foundational text of the New Color photography movement. He has taught at Bard College since 1982 and remains one of the most widely cited influences on contemporary color photography.
