American Surfaces: Revised & Expanded Edition

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It’s an unexpected statement coming from the man who made American Surfaces. But then American Surfaces was not the random result of some photographic compulsion: Shore conceived of and executed it as a disciplined artistic undertaking. “I think there may have been a slight difference,” Shore said about the symmetry between these photos and social-media photography. “When people are posting, I actually find it a little peculiar. Why would they think that I would be curious what they had for breakfast? But this was more a way of using my own experience as—it was about me, but it was also about exploring the culture through this mechanism [the snapshot].” The short answer: While I may have questions or intentions that guide what I’m interested in photographing at a particular moment, and even guide exactly where I place my camera, the core decision still comes from recognizing a feeling of deep connection, a psychological or emotional or physical resonance with the picture’s content.

SS: Not necessarily, and when I said I didn’t have a problem editing down, I meant I didn’t feel an obligation to include everything. There’s a lot of work, and the current edition has grown out of looking at some of the pictures that didn’t make it into the previous edition. There were a lot of pictures in the original show in ‘72 that were not included in the previous Phaidon edition of American Surfaces. When The Museum of Modern Art gave me my retrospective in 2017, the curator of the show, Quentin Bajac, wanted to recreate the American Surfaces show. I continued for about half a year photographing for the project after the show went up so Quentin could avail himself of the entire body of work. We decided to expand the original Phaidon book to include those. I do think about why people are all of a sudden looking at my work,” he told me 10 years ago, “and it occurs to me that it may have needed a distance in time for people to see what I was actually looking at. People need time. It’s much easier to look at the past than to look at the present.” Shore's images are structured around the experience of seeing, seeking to communicate the way in which the everyday might register to an outsider. He has regularly used his work as a form of visual diary, communicating his own experiences through his photographs. Shore's photographic choices suggest emotional states to the audience, often drawing power through the ways in which light and composition evoke feelings that the viewer cannot name.He also has been working on a series about Holocaust survivors in Ukraine. It is an unusual project for Shore: Art critics have typically downplayed his photos’ content and discussed instead their formal qualities or conceptual ideas. “I’m self aware enough to know that when I’m doing this, I‘m photographing much more loaded subject matter than I’ve ever dealt with before,” Shore said. “So the question is: Can I take a picture that is not just an illustration of the content but is a visually coherent picture and that could stand alone even if one didn’t know what I was photographing and also somehow communicate some essence of the situation?” Shore has spoken of his interest, across Uncommon Places, in prompting a deeper consideration of the quotidian through joining form with content so as to lose neither the image nor the complexities of North American life. Shore's subject is, as a diner breakfast, found across the United States whilst also, through the detailing of the plate and placemat, being specific to the place in which this example has been found. The references to Native American culture introduce an element of ambivalence to the photograph; they speak not only of the comforts of everyday life, but also of the myths upon which the United States has been built and the ways in which quotidian imagery serves to perpetuate these myths. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen was born in 1951 in Witten/ Germany. He works as an art theoretician and director of the art academy Akademie der bildenden KA1/4nste in Vienna/Austria.

Shore continued to benefit from the support of the adults around him; at age ten, a neighbor, president of a large music publishing company, gave him Walker Evans's American Photographs, a seminal work of documentary photography that would have a significant impact on Shore's own approach. Shore left the Upper West Side in 1959 to attend boarding school in Tarrytown, New York, where the headmaster, William Dexter, was an avid photographer who encouraged Shore by offering him access to his darkroom. Shore felt that his first successful photographs were taken while in Tarrytown, though he subsequently returned to New York City to attend high school at Columbia Grammar. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. Shore played a central role in establishing color photography as an art form, leading to more widespread questioning of the distinction between the snapshot and the calculated work of artists focused on form and tonal contrast. Shore's use of color opened up the possibility for subsequent artists; Nan Goldin has spoken of his work informing her use of candid color images arranged in slideshows, while Joel Sternfeld's use of color to capture the rural United States draws heavily from Shore's example. Shore's friendship with Bernd and Hilla Becher led to their use of his images when teaching in Düsseldorf and the impact of Uncommon Places on the representation of the environment in anti-romantic style that show humanity's impact and interaction with place can be seen clearly in the work of Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, who named his first book Unconscious Places (1987) in reference to Shore. These projects led to American Surfaces, where he set out to fully explore the main medium of vernacular photography: the color snapshot. “The word I used then for myself was ‘natural,’” Shore said. “I wanted to make pictures that felt natural, that felt like seeing, that didn’t feel like taking something in the world and making a piece of art out of it.” SS: I wasn’t working that closely with the title, but I had that in my mind that this was a general orientation that I was looking at, the surfaces that I encountered, the literal surfaces. What is the external appearance of this world I was entering into? And, so, color played an important role in that.Shore was a city boy, the only child of prosperous and culture-loving parents on the Upper East Side, and a prodigy, introduced to darkroom technique at the age of six. His mentors included Edward Steichen, who bought prints by him for the Museum of Modern Art when Shore was fourteen. From 1965 to 1967, his nearly daily presence at Andy Warhol’s Factory fostered an aesthetic of seemingly offhand deliberation. Meanwhile, Shore absorbed and gradually transcended formal lessons from the masters of his medium, most notably Walker Evans. He started where others had left off. It’s the bane of my existence that I see photography not as a way of recording personal experience particularly, but as this process of exploring the world and the medium,” Shore told me in his studio. “I have to be reminded, “’It’s your son’s birthday party. Bring a camera.’ And then, when I’m there, ‘Take a picture,’ because it doesn’t occur to me to use it as this memorializing thing.” These exhibits are an opportunity to admire the pure power of the camera at a time when many of us regard it as just another app on our smartphones. On social media, we stand in a buffet line of each other’s photos, stuffed but never satisfied. Shore’s large-format pictures from the 1970s, by contrast, are gourmet meals. The shows are also reminders, however, that before Shore adopted the large-format camera, he was making visual diaries in which he took a snapshot of every meal he ate, person he met, and bed he slept in.

The change was not a deliberate stylistic overhaul but a natural response to the technical differences of the large-format camera. 8x10 color is, Shore said, “the most cumbersome and expensive photographic process possible.” As a result, he had to be much more mindful of when and why he took a picture. Unlike Shore's other work, these pictures were sent away and developed as ordinary snapshots in Kodak corporation's New Jersey labs. Refusing to relate to the real in any mystical sense, the banality of the America of surfaces paradoxically gives way to the vivid mysteries of depth and color perception. The impact of the two-dimensional photographic print is maximized as an articulation of American culture itself.Together, they amounted to a new topography of the vernacular American landscape, his style in places approximating what came to be known as the snapshot aesthetic, in other places adhering to a detached, almost neutral formalism that only added to the deadpan everydayness of his images. Shore later described his democratic approach thus: “To see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognise it as a photographic possibility – that’s what I’m interested in.” Though dismissed at the time by many critics, his style has been enduringly influential and he is now recognised as one of the greatest living photographers. In 1973, I brought my first four-by-five work to show John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art. In those days, whenever I produced a new group of pictures I would bring them to John. That day he looked at the work and asked me if I was having fun. I was surprised by this question. I thought, Yes, I was, but I also thought that wasn’t the right answer. So I mumbled something pointless. The next time I brought a new body of work to John, he again asked if I was having fun. This time I said, “Yes.” He puffed on his pipe and said, “Good.” I felt our relationship changed after that. When I brought pictures to him from then on, he never offered advice, and only occasionally made a comment. I had the sense we were engaged in a visual communication—that he was savoring the images and taking them in. VH: You were born in New York City but your journey took you through small-town America. Were you looking to photograph communities that felt familiar to you or those that felt different from where and how you grew up? Digital photography allowed Shore to return to reclaim some of the casualness and immediacy of American Surfaces without sacrificing the image quality of Uncommon Places. “Cameras are now made that are the size of a 35 mm SLR that can take a picture that has the resolution of a view camera,” he said. “And so that camera that I was looking for in 1972? By 2008 that camera was being made.”

As a teenager, Stephen Shore was interested in film alongside still photography, and in his final year of high school one of his short films, entitled Elevator, was shown at Jonas Mekas' Film-Makers' Cinematheque. There, Shore was introduced to Andy Warhol and took this as an opportunity to ask if he could take photographs at Warhol's studio, the Factory, on 42nd Street. Warhol's answer was vague and Shore was surprised to receive a call a month later, inviting him to photograph filming at a restaurant called L'Aventura. Shore took up this offer and, soon afterward, began to spend a substantial amount of time at the Factory, photographing Warhol and the many others who spent time there. He had, by this point, become disengaged with his high school classes and dropped out of Columbia Grammar in his senior year, allowing him to spend more time at the Factory. I believe Uncommon Places to be about photography showing the beauty of everyday life, while American Surfaces displays the beauty of photography itself by reflecting itself within banal scenes of normality. There is place for both frames of mind, and I actually believe an understanding of the trade-offs between these two reference points is vital for any photographer today. After serving as informal house-photographer in Andy Warhol's factory in the late sixties, Stephen Shore came into international prominence with his celebrated first one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1971—the venerable institution's first-ever exhibition of a living photographer. Since then, his work has stood at the forefront of photography's increasingly important relation to contemporary art, pioneering new forms of color photography and conceptualism while preserving an interest in craft and composition integral to the medium since its nineteenth century invention. Shore is an altogether quieter photographer, but there is quirky humour in his images of vernacular buildings and signage that has often been overlooked. His eye lights on a barber’s shop window announcing the delights of Tyrone, the Great Contour Haircutter, and on a neon pharmacy sign that reads, perhaps without irony, Strange Drugs. There is a sense of someone discovering a whole new world of surprises under his nose: an America so obvious as to go unnoticed. It is now definably Stephen Shore’s America, though it nods to Robert Frank’s and, even more so, to Walker Evans’s America. I went to the view camera really for a simple reason that I wanted to continue with American Surfaces, but I wanted a larger negative to make bigger prints, because film at the time wasn’t very sharp,” he said. Look at the first Uncommon Places photos and the continuity with American Surfaces is obvious: For instance, he shoots his hotel television and bed. Soon, however, the images move away from interior spaces toward large images of neglected architecture, parking lots, and street intersections, .Shore was born in New York City in 1947, the sole son of Jewish parents who ran a handbag company. At the age of six, he began to develop his family’s photos with a dark-room kit his uncle had given him as a present. He received his first camera a couple years later, and when he was ten he received a copy of Walker Evans’ American Photographs.