Stephen Shore’s photographs of ordinary America have had an extraordinary impact on photography as an artistic practice. The artist set the standard for colour photography of the social landscape in his best known bodies of work American Surfaces and Uncommon Places, pioneering two of the most important photographic idioms of the past forty years; the diaristic snapshot and the monumentalised landscape. Shore’s art of pictorial composition and handling of colour, light and shadow also spurred interest in colour photography and for the first time gave it an unchallengeable status as a genuine artistic medium. In 1972 Shore embarked on his first road trip around America, focusing his camera on the immense diversity of the suburban landscape; anonymous intersections, residential architecture, uniform drive-by diners, generic motel rooms and monotonous gas stations. Embracing the work of the Conceptual artists of the 1960s who adopted the photographic medium as a tool to make systematic, often compulsive explorations of locations, Shore too began to assemble a sequential visual record of his travels in which the singular photograph was only significant in terms of its place in the series. His images are now seen as classic Americana; culturally rich snapshots showing the tempo, palette and artifacts of the time and place. The artist’s recent works in both digital and film, illustrate a continued interest in documenting the social landscape. In images captured during his visits to Israel, Abu Dhabi and Ukraine in the last four years, Shore's photographic eye similarly directs us to markers of time and of change, capturing the quotidian, a sense of locality and signs of cultural and temporal drift.
Read MoreStephen Shore was born in 1947 in New York City and currently lives in Tivoli, New York. Solo shows include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1971, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976, Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 1977, Ringling Museum, Sarasota, 1981, Art Institute of Chicago, 1984, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, 1995, SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne, 1999, Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Vienna, 2004, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 2005, International Centre of Photography, New York, 2007, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 2008, and Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 2011. Group exhibitions include Barbican Gallery, London, 1985, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 1987, National Gallery, Washington, 1989, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 1997, Whitney Museum, New York, 1999, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 1999, Tate Modern, London, 2003, Photographers Gallery, London, 2005, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006, 2007, 2013, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2013–2014, and Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2011.
Stephen Shore has been a recipient of a number of major awards over the course of his career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1975 and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974 & 1979. The artist was awarded the ‘Kulturpreis’ from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh) at the NRW-Forum in 2010. Since 1982 he has been the Director of the Photography Program at Bard College in New York State.
Text courtesy Sprüth Magers.