Background

Stephen Shore was born on October 8, 1947, in New York City, New York, United States. He was the only child in a family of Jewish parents.

Education

Stephen Shore spent his childhood in the Upper East Side neighborhood of New York City. Raised in a prosperous family, the boy had unrestricted access to art and culture.

Due to his uncle, since the age of six, Shore had a possibility to experiment with photography, mostly represented by family's snapshots taken with a simple Kodak Brownie, at his personal darkroom. The first color photos came three years later when he received a 35 mm camera from his parents. The book by a prominent photographer Walker Evans, ‘American Photographs’, that he received from one of the family’s neighbors had a great influence on his further approach.

In 1959, Stephen Shore came to Tarrytown, New York where he attended a boarding school. Being passionate about photography, the school’s headmaster, William Dexter, allowed Shore to spent time in his darkroom. Later, Shore came back to New York City where he pursued his studies at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School.

At the age of fourteen, Shore made an appointment with the Director of the Department of Photography of the Museum of Modern Art, Edward Steichen, to whom he presented a portfolio of his black and white images of New York City. Steichen was so impressed by the works that he bought three shots from the collection.

Another passion of Shore during his teenage years was filmmaking. In 1965, the final year of high school, one of his short movies, a 16mm ‘Elevator’ was demonstrated at Jonas Mekas' Film-Makers' Cinematheque. There, he met Andy Warhol who allowed him to attended his New York City studio, the Factory, then on 42nd Street, in order to develop his skills in photography.

To spend more time in the studio, Shore dropped Columbia Grammar on his senior year. During a couple of subsequent years, he communicated with and took photos of Warhol and other creative people. It was a good experience for the young photographer who explored the notion of serialization and grasped the value of experimentation and change in artistic development.

Career

Stephen Shore began his professional career in the early 1970s. During this period of time, the photographer decided to abandon the documentary tradition and to concentrated on the conceptual side of photography instead. In 1971, he had his first solo exhibition of color photographs held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and secondly, he served as a curator of a scandalous show 'All the Meat You Can Eat' in a SoHo loft. The debut solo show was followed the next year by an exhibition at LIGHT Gallery which began to represent Shore’s art.

The same year, the photographer initiated a trip around the United States, visiting the Carolinas, Texas, New Mexico, and the Midwest. About 100 rolls of film he produced with a Rollei camera resulted in the American Surfaces series. The next cross-country photo project was named Uncommon Places.

In 1975, the photographer received the financial support for his upcoming works first from the National Endowment for the Arts, and then from the Guggenheim Foundation. At the age of twenty-nine, Shore’s photos were presented at his next solo exhibition, this time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Although Stephen Shore continued to use an 8x10 camera during the subsequent years, he shifted from his cross-country road photo trips at the end of the 1970s. The ten following years the photographer lived in Bozeman, Montana was devoted to the pictures of local landscapes. In 1982, the photographer joined the professor’s staff of Bard College as the director of its photography department. The first monograph of his work, Uncommon Places, saw the print the same year at Aperture Publishes.

In the 1990s, Shores came back to New York City where he tried himself in black-and-white street photography. After joining the ranks of commercial photographers, Shore has collaborated with such fashion publications like AnOther Magazine, Elle, Daily Telegraph, and Bottega Veneta. Within a commission from the latter, he took photos of Lydia Hearst, moviemaker Liz Goldwyn and model Will Chalker.

The turn of the century was marked by another shift in Shore’s career. He tried his hand in digital photography for the first time, and in 2014 created an account on Instagram exploring the possibilities the platform proposes for photographers.

Since his debut exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1971, Stephen Shore has exhibited worldwide, having a great number of presentations in the notable art spaces of the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Australia, Belgium, South Korea, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, and Canada. The major retrospective of Shore’s art organized at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2017 featured the works he has created for sixty years of his career. The number of visitors who saw the exhibition attended more than half-million people.

In addition to many volumes featuring his photos, Shore has several books on the theory of photography to his credit, including ‘The Nature of Photographs’, first published in 1998.

In addition to his photo trips around the United States, he has also traveled through Israel, the West Bank, and Ukraine.

Nowadays, Stephen Shore is a Susan Weber Professor in the Arts and the director of Photography Program at Bard College.

Achievements

• 

  Stephen Shore is considered as one of the most important photographers of his time. By using color when it was dismissed by others and taking photos of everyday life instead of the topical subjects, he revised the notion of documentary and landscape photography. Contrary to form and tonality, the emotions have prime importance on Shore’s pictures.
  
  Shore’s approach has influenced many other artists like Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Martin Parr, Joel Sternfeld, and Thomas Struth.
  
  Stephen Shore’s contributions to photography have been marked by such awards as Aperture Portfolio Prize, German Society for Photography Culture Award, Photo London Master of Photography Award, and Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Arts. He was a recipient of the grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, American Academy in Rome, and the MacDowell Colony.
  
  A twenty-five-years-old Shore was the first living photographer after Alfred Stieglitz who had a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His photos have been collected in more than 25 monographs and books, including ‘Uncommon Places: The Complete Works’, ‘American Surfaces’, and ‘Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973-1981’.
  
  Shore is recognized not only as a talented photographer but as an innovative educator as well. Since he occupied the post of a Director of the photography department at Bard College, he has ameliorated its educational process by employing the notable photographers to teach at the institution, and by placing Straight Photography at the first place in the curriculum while mixed media approaches were on the trend. Among the notable artists that studied under Shore are Lucas Blalock, Paul Salveson, Shannon Ebner, Tim Davis, and Matthew Porter.
  
  In 2017, Shore’s photo ‘Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California, August 13’ was purchased at Sotheby's in New York City for $43,750.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Stephen Shore: Survivors in Ukraine

    (A powerful and haunting visual record, Stephen Shore's po...)

    2016
  • Factory: Andy Warhol

    (Warhol's Factory as seen through the lens of a young Shor...)

    2016
  • The Nature of Photographs

    (The author looks at the physical, depletive, and mental i...)

    1998
  • The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory, 1965-1967

    (A book by Stephen Shore and Lynne Tillman.)

    1995

• photography

  • Rene Ricard, Susan Bottomly, Eric Emerson, Mary Woronov, Andy Warhol, Ronnie Cutrone, Paul Morrissey, Pepper Davis

  • Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, July 1972

  • Breakfast, Trail's End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973

  • Ginger Shore, Causeway Inn, Tampa, Florida, November 17, 1977

  • New York City 2000/2002

  • Jerusalem, Israel, January 9, 2010 Stephen Shore

  • Tsal Groisman, Korsun, Ukraine, July 20, 2012

  • Back Road, Presidio, TX

  • Backyard off U.S. 98, Apalachacola, Florida, February 4, 1976

  • Home of Musya Vainshteyn, Nemirov, Ukraine, October 16, 2013

  • Badlands National Monument, South Dakota 7/14/1973

  • El Paso Street, El Paso, Texas 7/5/1975

  • New York, New York, November 29, 2017

  • Lou Reed, Andy Warhol

  • Lookout Hotel, Ogunquit, Maine

  • West 9th avenue, Amarillo Texas, October 2, from the series Uncommon Places

  • Horseshoe Bend Motel, Lovell, Wyoming, July 16, 1973

  • Hyalite canyon, Gallatin County, Montana, December 26, 2017

  • Three Forks, Montana, August 6, 2017

  • Home of Rakhil Rusakovskaya, Kiev, Ukraine, July 28, 2012

  • Three Forks, Montana, August 6, 2017

  • Isaak Bakmayev's Medals, Berdichev, Zhytomyrska Province, Ukraine, July 29, 2012

  • New York, New York, May 19, 2017

  • London, England, July 9, 2017

  • Miami Florida, 28/7/1975

  • New York, New York, May 19, 2017

  • Perrine, Florida, November 11

  • U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, July 21, 1973

  • Brazil, Indiana, 7/15/2014

Views

Stephen Shore’s photos are the kind of his personal visual diary through which he shares his own experience with other people. The light and composition of the images indulge viewers in a certain emotional state.

Quotations: "With a painting, you're taking basic building blocks and making something that's more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: It takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it."

"I think it is the intention of the photographer that makes one surface transparent and one opaque regardless of scale. Some are meant to be seen, I believe, just as a surface to be looked at and others you step into and enter the analytic problem of the picture."

"A photograph has edges the world does not."

"So much of the "taste" of a picture comes from the light or the sense of clarity or the sense of vividness. A lot of these subtler qualities have to do with the light and it is not just, is this a nice day, it is the absolute specifics of the light reflecting off this object at exactly this angle at exactly this moment."

"Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable."

"What I derived from Warhol was a delight in our culture, a kind of ambiguous delight."

"I think that in a certain way, mine is maybe a reaction to being a strongly stated, or visually stated view, and so there is a kind of restraint in the way I worked. But also I just saw a complexity in what I was drawn to that could not be expressed simply in terms of this is bad, this is not."

"I always was interested in everyday experience. Rather than finding something unusual to photograph, I was always interested in seeing attentively things that are around us all the time."

Membership

Stephen Shore was named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 2010.

• Royal Photographic Society , United Kingdom

  2010

Interests

• fly fishing

Connections

Stephen Shore met his future wife, Ginger Cramer, in 1976. They married at the beginning of the next decade.

Stephen and Ginger have a son named Nicholas. He is a film producer.

Son:

Nicholas Shore

Nick photographed by Stephen Shore at the Women's March, New York City, January 2017.

Wife:

Ginger Cramer

Friend:

Andy Warhol

Acquaintance:

Garry Winogrand

Acquaintance:

Dennis Oppenheim

Friend:

Bernd Becher

Friend:

Hilla Becher

References

• Stephen Shore's Official Website