Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore had his work purchased by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, at age fourteen. At seventeen, Shore was a regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory, producing an important photographic document of the scene, and in 1971, at the age of twenty-four, he became the first living photographer since Alfred Stieglitz forty years earlier to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has had numerous one-man shows, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1982, he has been director of the photography program at Bard College. Stephen Shore had his work purchased by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, at age fourteen. At seventeen, Shore was a regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory, producing an important photographic document of the scene, and in 1971, at the age of twenty-four, he became the first living photographer since Alfred Stieglitz forty years earlier to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has had numerous one-man shows, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1982, he has been director of the photography program at Bard College. David Campany is one of the best-known and most accessible writers on photography. His books include The Open Road (Aperture, 2014), Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (2013), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (2011), Photography and Cinema (2008), and Art and Photography (2003). His essays have appeared in numerous books and he contributes regularly to Aperture, Frieze, Photoworks, and Oxford Art Journal. Sandra S. Phillips was the longtime senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Marta Dahó is an independent curator based in Barcelona and the curator of the Stephen Shore exhibition at Fundación MAPFRE Horacio Fernández is a photo historian, curator, and author. From 2004 to 2006 he was commissioning general of PHotoEspaña. He is author of The Latin American Photobook (Aperture, 2011).

This substantial catalogue, published by Fundación Mapfre/Aperture, is—surpisingly—the first to explore Shore's remarkable life and career in depth. The selection of 250 images spans six decades and includes his rarely exhibited black-and-white work: New York street pictures, including a gritty bunch from the mid-'60s and a more stately one from 2002; nature studies in Essex County, New york, taken in 1990; and a portrait from Luzzara, Italy, taken in 1993. There are chapters highlighting his familiar style in color with a view camera—Ukraine and Arizona landscapes—as well as one on his embrace of digital print-on-demand technology. But the bulk of the plates and writings here are devoted, rightfully, to the 70's, when Shore completed two exceptional projects, American Surfaces and Uncommon Places. It is hard to imagine them as products of the same artist, so antithetical do they seem in how they are organized and in what subjects they memorialize. –BookforumAn exploration of Stephen Shore's groundbreaking photography split into three parts, Survey dissects the complex ideas behind Shore's deceptively straight-forward images. –TIME LightboxShore revolutionized photography with his colleagues with color, an aesthetic shift that mirrored Warhol’s fascination with industrial/mechanical processes and the serial reproduction of images. –TimeStephen Shore was part of a remarkable generation that reinvented the medium, subordinating the excessive beauty of color film to a formal discipline –The New York TimesShore used seemingly unimportant elements of the landscape—lampposts, fences, blank walls and sidewalks—to frame back alleys and gasoline strips, imbuing them with a kind of wistful poetry. –The New York TImes