Modern Painters | October 2007

Stephen Shore
International Center for Photography, New York

In 1973, following in the footsteps of John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Walker Evans, and countless vacationers who documented their travels across North America, the 26-year-old photographer Stephen Shore packed up his large-format camera and took to the road. It would be the first of many journeys for him-from that summer until 1979 he made several such trips. But where many who had gone before him set out to find adventure, novelty, authenticity, or some combination thereof, Shore's mission was devoid of romanticism. Instead, Shore sought what has since become a photographic (also artistic) cliché: the poetry of the mundane.

Seeing the photos from Shore's "American Surfaces" (1972) and "Uncommon Places" (1973-78) series today, it's difficult not to be snared by their retro appeal, one that might have gripped even Stephen Shore himself. Signage, in particular, becomes emblematic of a particular time and place, redolent of a vanished small-town heartland. The photograph titled Proton Avenue, Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, August 18, 1974 is memorable for the classic Esso gas-station sign flanking a road that cuts through a dusty intersection before extending into the wide-open plains. In another work, a young woman on a sidewalk, with her hair painstakingly styled into a glamorous helmet and fashionably large sunglasses barely concealing the skeptical look in her eyes, gingerly handles some books with her manicured fingers while she waits for the photographer to finish taking the picture that will be titled Main Street, Fort Worth, Texas, June 17, 1976. Numerous hotel rooms, showing beds with sheets rumpled or carefully made up, reveal surprising touches of elegance in the form of a graceful imitation Danish modern armchair or a branch of cherry blossoms stenciled on a wall. The photographs emphasize, even celebrate details, and Shore has an eagle eye for casual artistry.

By focusing on Shore's early work, from 1969 to 1979, the exhibition ramifies inevitably into a study of his artistic development, ultimately highlighting the conceptual nature of his photos. As a teenager, Shore hooked up with Warhol's Factory and hung out there from 1965 to 1967. The firsthand exposure to Warhol's artistic process had a lasting effect, and, looking at the photographs with this influence in mind, one begins to see them less as an attempt to capture a past-or even a present-Shore saw disappearing than as efforts to be vacant: absent of content and interested only in exploring the way that our perception changes the longer we look at something, so that what once appeared boring suddenly becomes fascinating. This work is not really concerned with the mundane, then, any more than Warhol's film Haircut (1963) was about a haircut. Rather, it encapsulates a way of seeing, a way of situating oneself in time and space. At ICP a long vitrine featured pages from the journal Shore kept during one of his trips, a log that merely recorded the meals he ate and the places he stopped, with a few pictures and postcards glued to the paper every so often. According to the wall text, Shore says that the journal entries evidence "a fascination with how certain kinds of facts and materials from the external world can describe a day or an activity." Given the placidity of such a statement, it was pleasantly surprising when one aspect of the show offered a glimpse into the darker regions of Shore's unconscious. A re-creation of a small section of "All the Meat You Can Eat," an exhibition of found photographs that Shore curated in 1971 in the 98 Greene Street Loft, a space in which artists could create their own projects, offered a counterpoint to the machinelike cool. It included police photographs taken from the files of the district attorney in Amarillo, Texas, disturbing images showing, for example, a bloodstain on a road, or a woman with a black eye lying in a hospital bed. There was also a picture, unlabeled, of a mass grave filled with emaciated bodies; as well as confiscated homemade pornography. The selection showed Shore's taste for both the perverse and the glamorous (there were some headshots, such as one of Lucille Ball), and proved that what prevents the photographs of his sojourns from being deathly boring is his appreciation for the weird and the kitsch, which comes across in his striking visual style.

—Claire Barliant

Modern Painters | October 2007

Stephen Shore
International Center for Photography, New York

In 1973, following in the footsteps of John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Walker Evans, and countless vacationers who documented their travels across North America, the 26-year-old photographer Stephen Shore packed up his large-format camera and took to the road. It would be the first of many journeys for him-from that summer until 1979 he made several such trips. But where many who had gone before him set out to find adventure, novelty, authenticity, or some combination thereof, Shore's mission was devoid of romanticism. Instead, Shore sought what has since become a photographic (also artistic) cliché: the poetry of the mundane.

Seeing the photos from Shore's "American Surfaces" (1972) and "Uncommon Places" (1973-78) series today, it's difficult not to be snared by their retro appeal, one that might have gripped even Stephen Shore himself. Signage, in particular, becomes emblematic of a particular time and place, redolent of a vanished small-town heartland. The photograph titled Proton Avenue, Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, August 18, 1974 is memorable for the classic Esso gas-station sign flanking a road that cuts through a dusty intersection before extending into the wide-open plains. In another work, a young woman on a sidewalk, with her hair painstakingly styled into a glamorous helmet and fashionably large sunglasses barely concealing the skeptical look in her eyes, gingerly handles some books with her manicured fingers while she waits for the photographer to finish taking the picture that will be titled Main Street, Fort Worth, Texas, June 17, 1976. Numerous hotel rooms, showing beds with sheets rumpled or carefully made up, reveal surprising touches of elegance in the form of a graceful imitation Danish modern armchair or a branch of cherry blossoms stenciled on a wall. The photographs emphasize, even celebrate details, and Shore has an eagle eye for casual artistry.

By focusing on Shore's early work, from 1969 to 1979, the exhibition ramifies inevitably into a study of his artistic development, ultimately highlighting the conceptual nature of his photos. As a teenager, Shore hooked up with Warhol's Factory and hung out there from 1965 to 1967. The firsthand exposure to Warhol's artistic process had a lasting effect, and, looking at the photographs with this influence in mind, one begins to see them less as an attempt to capture a past-or even a present-Shore saw disappearing than as efforts to be vacant: absent of content and interested only in exploring the way that our perception changes the longer we look at something, so that what once appeared boring suddenly becomes fascinating. This work is not really concerned with the mundane, then, any more than Warhol's film Haircut (1963) was about a haircut. Rather, it encapsulates a way of seeing, a way of situating oneself in time and space. At ICP a long vitrine featured pages from the journal Shore kept during one of his trips, a log that merely recorded the meals he ate and the places he stopped, with a few pictures and postcards glued to the paper every so often. According to the wall text, Shore says that the journal entries evidence "a fascination with how certain kinds of facts and materials from the external world can describe a day or an activity." Given the placidity of such a statement, it was pleasantly surprising when one aspect of the show offered a glimpse into the darker regions of Shore's unconscious. A re-creation of a small section of "All the Meat You Can Eat," an exhibition of found photographs that Shore curated in 1971 in the 98 Greene Street Loft, a space in which artists could create their own projects, offered a counterpoint to the machinelike cool. It included police photographs taken from the files of the district attorney in Amarillo, Texas, disturbing images showing, for example, a bloodstain on a road, or a woman with a black eye lying in a hospital bed. There was also a picture, unlabeled, of a mass grave filled with emaciated bodies; as well as confiscated homemade pornography. The selection showed Shore's taste for both the perverse and the glamorous (there were some headshots, such as one of Lucille Ball), and proved that what prevents the photographs of his sojourns from being deathly boring is his appreciation for the weird and the kitsch, which comes across in his striking visual style.

—Claire Barliant