VISUAL SIGNATURE

Stephen Shore

  • American photographer (born in New York on Oct. 8, 1947)
  • Colour pioneer (mostly known for vernacular scenes of USA)
  • His visual language is distinguishable by the manner of refining the ordinary and banal into artistic form.
  • Received a darkroom kit at the age of six from his uncle.
  • At the age of 10, neighbour (music publisher) gave him Walker Evans book.
  • While he was 14, the Museum of Modern Art acquired his prints under the leadership of Edward Steichen, who bought 3 of his pictures when Stephen contacted him.
  • In the mid-60s photographed Andy Warhol’s Factory with its habitués, from Lou Reed and Nico to Marcel Duchamp, for about 3 years.
  • Andy Warhol’s Factory and seeing Artists making aesthetic decisions influenced his Pop Art and Conceptual Art ideas.
  • In the 1970s and ‘80s, Shore embarked on a series of coast-to-coast road trips through the United States, The resulting series, American Surfaces (1972) and Uncommon Places (1973-1982), established Shore’s mastery of unexplored directions in color and subject matter and are seminal contributions to the history of photography.
  • In 1971, at the age of 23, he earned the distinction of becoming the first living photographer since Alfred Stieglitz to receive a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  • In 1982 his book, "Uncommon Places" became a bible for young photographers seeking to work in color
  • Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth have acknowledged his work as inspiration.
  • Shore is a fan of Garry Winogrand’s work.
  • Has had one-man shows at Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts...
  • Kodacolor negative films & Chromogenic color prints mostly
  • Nikons, Leica M3, Deardorff 4X5 & 8X10 Large Format film cameras, phone, Hasselblad X1D...

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"When I was 17, I met Andy Warhol and asked if I could come to his studio to photograph. And as soon as I went there, I realized that that was more interesting than going to high school."

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"Don't be upset about the things you have no control of"
– Stephen Shore

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"My idea was to keep the visual diary of meal I ate, people I met, televisions I watched, motel rooms I slept, toilets I used. As well as the towns I would drive through. And through this visual diary and series of repeated subject build kind of cultural picture of the country at the time."

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"One thing I wanted to do was take pictures that felt like they were not burdened with visual conventions"

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"I wanted to take pictures that felt like seeing."

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"And I wanted pictures that felt as natural as speaking.. What was the experience of looking like."

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In "Uncommon Places" I'm often relying on descriptive power of the camera to make a complex picture that the viewer moves their attention through. So what I'm doing is creating the small world for a viewer to explore, rather than the impression of what it's like to look through my eyes.

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"I'm interested into formal concerns. About how to convert the experience of a complex 3Dimentional space into flat bounded medium. But at the same time I'm looking at the cultural exploration..."

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"One thing that I've noticed uising the view camera. Because the images are so higly detailed, there are little things in the picture that I can see that I don't have to make the subject of the picture."

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"I was attracted to very crisp bright light days, because that light I felt communicated the experience of Clarity."

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"Whenever I find that I begin to repeat myself I look ahead in a new Direction"
– Stephen Shore

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"Sometimes it is changing location, changing the subject metter. And sometimes it's change in form of the work and taking advantage of possibilities that might not have existed before."

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"In Israel and the West bank I wanted to both convey the presense of the conflict but also convey a sense of the land and a daily life."

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Shore documents the last living Holocaust survivors scattered across Ukrainian towns..

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“Why can’t a photograph be all four things at once? -be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level...”
— Stephen Shore

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“To see something spectacular and recognise it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility – that is what I am interested in.”
– Stephen Shore

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Books

"Uncommon Places came about because I had a show in ’76 at MoMA and he [Ansel Adams] saw it and came back with his editor at New York Graphic Society, named Tim Hill, and suggested they do a book. That’s how Uncommon Places happened."

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Stephen Shore
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