Fotografie Stephena Shora mialy ogromny wplyw na sztuke XX wieku. W latach 70' Shore przejechal Ameryke w dluzsz i wszerz by zebrac material na dwie ksiazki, American Surfaces oraz Uncommon Places. Obie staly sie kultowymi pozycjami w swiecie fotografii.
Stephen Shore’s photographs of ordinary America have had an
extraordinary impact. Shore spent the 1970s criss-crossing the
continent to assemble his two best known bodies of work, American
Surfaces and Uncommon Places. These photographs focused on the minutiae
of modern life, unveiling the exceptional beauty to be found in
banality and, in the process, pioneering the two most important
photographic idioms of the past thirty years: the diaristic snapshot
(later taken up by such artists as Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans)
and the monumentalized landscape (as practiced by such photographers as
Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky). Shore was also one of the first art
photographers to work in colour, capturing the sky blues, mustard
yellows and avocado greens of a nation whose chromatic enthusiasm
occasionally outstripped its taste.
Less
well known are Shore’s earlier works. While still in high school in the
mid-1960s he undertook a three-year project shooting Andy Warhol’s
legendary studio, the Factory, at its creative peak, featuring a
revolving cast of characters that included the Velvet Underground,
Nico, Edie Sedgwick and of course Warhol himself. Soon afterward,
inspired by the intellectually fertile late-1960s New York art scene,
Shore produced a body of conceptual work seldom exhibited but fully
engaged with the revolutionary ideas shaking the foundations of modern
art. These works are fascinating not only for their contribution to the
redefinition of the art object but also for the way they prefigured
much of Shore’s work to follow, including American Surfaces and
Uncommon Places.
Since the 1970s Shore has
continued to expand his repertoire, moving effortlessly between black
and white and colour, landscape and portraiture, large format and
small. In so doing, he has proven himself to be one of contemporary
art’s most vital photographers. As fellow photographer Joel Sternfeld
writes in the Focus section, ‘What may ultimately be at stake in his
pictures is the pure condition of sight itself.’
Christie
Lange's Survey tracks the artist’s remarkable development from his
precocious beginnings to his most recent groundbreaking work. In the
Interview Michael Fried asks the artist what steps he takes when
composing photographs to embody them with such a vivid sense of spatial
empathy. Joel Sternfeld’s Focus looks at Holden Street, North Adams,
Massachusetts, July 13, 1974, a deceptively simple image that
masterfully interweaves colour, content and composition. Artist’s
Choice features a range of historical quotes that distill centuries of
wit and wisdom into a handful of timeless maxims. With language as
uncluttered as his photographs, the Artist’s Writings offer a clear
view of his incisive thinking on the subjects of photography, vision
and experience.
