I had assimilated those questions and they didn’t have to be at the forefront of my mind in the same way as they had a year or two before.” “I still had questions that I wanted to pursue, and did for a couple of years after, but at that point I had enough experience that I was beginning to know instinctively how to structure the picture. “I felt with project the beginning of something new,” he says. The transition opened up new formal challenges that Shore had largely resolved by the time Fortune came calling. Having refined his ability to read the unfamiliar, the years following American Surfaces saw Shore move from 35mm to a view camera. “Or I could identify its unique features and know how to interpret them.” “I’d be able to go into a town and make sense of it,” says Shore. Shot in colour on a road trip from his native New York City to Amarillo, Texas, the series’ ethnographic approach equipped Shore with the tools he’d need for his subsequent visit to the Rust Belt. “These were the people who voted Trump into office.”įive years prior to the commission, Shore had exhibited the landmark American Surfaces in New York, a series that in both style and substance initiated a radical shift in contemporary photography, despite its lukewarm reception at the time. “I realised that – 40 years later – the children of these people I’d photographed grew up in economically depressed areas of the Rust Belt,” says Shore. The seeds of this devastation, which Shore documented in its relative infancy, have yielded an irrevocable change in American politics, from the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 to Trump in 2016. The artist lives in Tivoli, New York.Shore’s series took him across Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, to factory towns whose identity had disappeared overnight, leaving a void that extended far beyond the vacant workshops and bars that now lay silent. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. His work is held in major collections, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY Whitney Museum of American Art, NY Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Exhibitions of his work have been hosted at the Art Institute of Chicago, IL International Center of Photography, NY Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf and Hammer Museum, CA. More than 25 books have been published of his photographs, including Uncommon Places: The Complete Works American Surfaces and Stephen Shore, published by the Museum of Modern Art to accompany the artist's major retrospective through May 2018. In 1971, he earned the distinction of becoming the first living photographer since Alfred Stieglitz to receive a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While he was 14, the Museum of Modern Art acquired his prints under the leadership of Edward Steichen. The resulting series, American Surfaces (1972) and Uncommon Places (1973-1982), established Shore's mastery of hitherto unexplored directions in color and subject matter and are seminal contributions to the history of photography. Looking back to the traditions of masters Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand, he adopted straightforward perspectives and attention to formal composition as he visually catalogued the spirit of modern America. In the 1970s and '80s, Shore embarked on a series of coast-to-coast road trips through the United States to document the modern American landscape. He was one of the first to recognize and advocate its value. It was also at this time that Shore began pursuing color photography, a technique that was entirely novel in the art world and denigrated as a commercial form acceptable only for amateur and advertising use. There, the Pop concepts he encountered informed his interested in subjects that the conventional art world conventionally snubbed, including mundane objects, daily rituals, and commercial visual culture. In his teens, Shore became a frequent visitor and photographer of Andy Warhol's studio The Factory. At the age of six, he received a darkroom kit, teaching himself the art as he grew up. Shore grew up in New York City with early exposure to the medium of photography and emerging artistic practices. In particular, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth have acknowledged his work as inspiration. Shore's vision of the ordinary world in full color is now so pervasive that its monumental influences are often taken for granted as inherent properties of photography. With a small number of contemporaries, he championed the elevation of color photography as art and redefined the documentary tradition in American photography. Stephen Shore is a pioneer of color and vernacular photography.
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