Stephen Shore - by Quentin Bajac (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Organized into 60 thematic sections, this magisterial volume provides a complete overview of Shore's career--from the early portraits of Warhol's Factory to his latest Instagram images

One of the most influential photographers of our time, Stephen Shore has often been categorized as one of a group of artists of the 1970s who captured American popular culture in straightforward, unglamorous color images. While this is true, it is only part of the story: Shore has worked with many forms of photography, switching from cheap automatic cameras to large format in the 1970s, pioneering the use of color film before returning to black and white in the 1990s, and, in the 2000s, taking up the opportunities offered by digital photography, digital printing and social media.

Published to accompany the first comprehensive survey of Stephen Shore's work in the US, this catalog reflects the full range of his contribution, including the gelatin silver prints he made as a teenager (and sold to The Museum of Modern Art); his photographs of the scene at Andy Warhol's Factory, in New York; the color images he made during cross-country road trips in the 1970s; his recent explorations of Israel, the West Bank and Ukraine; and his current work on digital platforms, including Instagram.

This book offers a fresh, kaleidoscopic vision of the artist's extensive career, presenting more than 400 reproductions arranged in a thematic framework, each grouping accompanied by a short but wide-ranging essay. This unique encyclopedia-style format makes visible the artist's versatility of technique and the diversity of his output, reflecting his singular vision and uncompromising pursuit of photography's possibilities.

Stephen Shore (born 1947) was the first living photographer to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz (40 years earlier). He has also had solo shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard College, New York, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

Review Quotes

... a comprehensive survey of the five-decade long career of American photographer Stephen Shore, deemed as one of the most significant names in the world of contemporary photography.-- "Blouin Artinfo"

...the most complete picture yet of the career of one of America's most important living artists.--Conor Risch "PDN"

...the most comprehensive collection of work by iconic photographer Stephen Shore ever organised.--James Gabriel Martin "Lonely Planet"

[Shore's] best pictures at once arouse feelings and leave us alone to make what we will of them. He delivers truths, whether hard or easy, with something very much like mercy.--Peter Schjeldahl "The New Yorker"

In an age when iPhones have turned most everyone into a wandering photographer of medium-to-low talent, Shore offers a model of straight photography at its most lucid and ravishing.--Deborah Soloman "WNYC"

It's hard to think of a living photographer who's had a more varied and interesting career than Shore has -- or a career that got off to such an early start.--Mark Feeney "Boston Globe"

Not staged, not lit, not cropped, not retouched, his photographs are feats of dispassionate representation, and yet their attentiveness and exactitude make them far, far more than snapshots.--Jason Farago "The New York Times"

Retrospectives can be strange events for artists. Some don't want one, fearing it might prematurely close the book on their work. At seventy, Stephen Shore is adding pages to his.--Lynn Tillman "4 Columns"

Shore has single-handedly created a visual vocabulary that defines the iconography of America -- beautiful, haunting images that evoke more than just a time and a place, but lives lived, desires lost and dreams unfulfilled.--Annie Proulx "The New York Times, T Magazine"

Until Stephen Shore began making his color photos of breakfasts, beds, intersections, parking lots and just about everything else that drifted into his visual field, no one else annotated the banal surfaces of American life with quite the same level of unjudgmental aplomb.--Teju Cole "The New York Times"