PHOTO:Stephen Shore

In the ‘70s, when black and white was still considered the medium of ‘serious’ work, Stephen Shore was one of the frontier artists to use colour photography, and he continuously challenged the conventions of the medium at large by turning his camera towards ‘the everyday’ in direct subversion to the notion that photography had to prove itself a serious artform through pictorial or dogmatically formal means.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MoMA Archive

The exhibition dedicated in Stephen Shore’s work at MoMA includes hundreds of photographic works along with additional materials including books, ephemera, and objects and tracks the artist’s work chronologically, from the gelatin silver prints he made as a teenager to his current work with digital platforms. Born in New York City in 1947, he learned about and practiced photography from the age of six. In 1958, Shore was given a copy of Walker Evans’ book American Photographs. This book had a profound effect on him, introducing him to a descriptive visual language of place. At the age of fourteen, his work was bought by Edward Steichen for the collection of MoMA. Shore showed his short film “Elevator” in 1965 at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, where he first met Andy Warhol. “Elevator” is screened in the exhibition for the first time since the 1960s. From 1965 through 1967, Shore worked in Andy Warhol’s studio, an experience that allowed him to experiment with combining documentary and conceptual modes. In 1971, at the age of twenty-four, Shore had a solo exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first accorded a living American photographer. In March 1972, he started taking snapshots of his daily life, embarking in June and July of the same year on a road trip to the southern US. For two months he photographed his everyday life in an almost systematic way, these photos were shown under the title “American Surfaces”. The Exhibition of this work echoes that initial presentation, in which the small Kodacolor prints were attached directly to the wall, unframed, in a grid of three rows. Begun in 1973 and completed almost 10 years later, Shore’s next project, “Uncommon Places”, inhabits the same world and deals with the same themes as “American Surfaces”.  Though he is best known for his large-format work of this period, Shore was at the same time experimenting with other photographic formats. The exhibition includes a selection of stereo images he made in 1974 that were never published, and have not been exhibited since 1975. Starting in the late ‘70s, Shore gradually abandoned urban and suburban areas and turned to the natural landscape, a subject he would concentrate on almost exclusively during the next decade. These included the landscapes of Montana (1982-83), Texas (1983-88) and the Hudson Valley (1984-86), but also more international locations: the Highlands of Scotland (1988), Yucatán (1990) and finally the Po Valley (1993). In the early 2000s Shore began experimenting with digital tools and technologies that had only recently become available. Between 2003 and 2010, he made dozens of print-on-demand books, which were each printed in limited editions of 20 copies, making them similar to artist’s books.  Between September of 2009 and the spring of 2011, Shore went in Israel five times, photographing throughout the entire territory from north to south, or “From Galilee to the Negev”, as he titled the book he published of a selection of his photographs in Israel and the West Bank The photographs Shore took in Ukraine in the summer of 2012 and the fall of 2013 have as their subject the country’s Jewish community, specifically survivors of the Holocaust. In the summer of 2014 Shore decided to devote most of his photographic activity to Instagram, where he posts images almost every day. While he continues to take on commissions, the bulk of his personal production over the past three years has been through the social networking app; he considers this output his current work.

Info: Curators: Quentin Bajac and Kristen Gaylord, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 11 West 53 Street, New York, Duration 19/11/17-25/5/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sun 10:30-17:30, Fri-Sat 10:30-21:00, www.moma.org