Stephen Shore

Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979 offers an alternative account of one of the most fabled episodes in photographic history: the cross-country journeys that produced Stephen Shore’s luminous new vision of the American landscape, Uncommon Places. Along with his large-format camera, Shore also brought a 35mm Leica on his travels. The images made with it, on luminous colour slide film, are intimate, spontaneous and personal, while retaining Shore’s studied formal sensitivity. In show more these entirely unseen photographs, a parallel iteration of an iconic vision emerges like a piece of music played in a new key.

The vocabulary is familiar: highways and homes, phone boxes, fast food and sun-strewn parking lots. But the alternative format unmistakably re-envisions these subjects through distinct experiments with composition, attitude, and colour. Transparencies uncovers both a detail-oriented survey of the American landscape of the 1970s and a rigorous, imaginative exercise in form by an undisputed modern master.

With an afterword by Britt Salvesen, curator at LACMA, titled ‘Ordinary Speech: The Vernacular in Stephen Shore’s Early 35mm Photography’. show less

Claude Monet found inspiration in the rose-covered trellises, wild rambles of nasturtiums, and idle drift of water lilies in the gardens of Giverny outside Paris. So too did Stephen Shore, who photographed the gardens one hundred years later after their painstaking restoration. Commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art to photograph the renascence of the gardens, Shore visited Giverny over six years beginning in 1977. Going to the gardens before dawn and leaving after dusk, in different show more seasons, he came to know them in all the moods and textures that inspired Monet. Shore's fidelity to the gardens' plenitude and his desire to present the abstract beauty of nature result in exquisitely serene photographs that express the essence of Giverny. show less

"Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979 offers an alternative account of one of the most fabled episodes in photographic history: the cross-country journeys that produced Stephen Shore’s luminous new vision of the American landscape, Uncommon Places. Along with his large-format camera, Shore also brought a 35mm Leica on his travels. The images made with it, on luminous colour slide film, are intimate, spontaneous and personal, while retaining Shore’s studied formal sensitivity. In show more these entirely unseen photographs, a parallel iteration of an iconic vision emerges like a piece of music played in a new key. The vocabulary is familiar: highways and homes, phone boxes, fast food and sun-strewn parking lots. But the alternative format unmistakably re-envisions these subjects through distinct experiments with composition, attitude, and colour. Transparencies uncovers both a detail-oriented survey of the American landscape of the 1970s and a rigorous, imaginative exercise in form by an undisputed modern master. With an afterword by Britt Salvesen, curator at LACMA, titled 'Ordinary Speech: The Vernacular in Stephen Shore’s Early 35mm Photography'." show less

This is a landmark book which represent the convergence of many crucial trends in photography: use of color film, snapshot esthetic, interest for the everyday and the social landscape, deadpan irony. In 1972 Shore was following Walker Evans, incorporating Warhol's influence, coming along the same path of Eggleston, starting part of what was soon to be summarized by the New Topographics 1975 exhibition and anticipating many others photographic evolutions still to come. So this is really show more important material. I'm a bit disappointed by the quality of the prints and by the overall book design and typographic (but we're talking about a quite cheap book). show less