American Surfaces: Revised & Expanded Edition

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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.

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. American Surfaces was first published as a book of seventy-two images in 1999. In 2005, consistent with his practice of revisiting and reworking earlier series through the medium of the photobook, Shore published the series in its entirety for the first time, and applied a cohesive structure to the works, grouping them by year and the state in which they were taken (see Shore 2005). These digital prints owned by Tate were made in the same year in an edition of ten.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.

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. 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.” For 22 months beginning in March 1972, Shore traveled across the continental United States with a simple Rollei 35 – a camera so diminutive in stature that it earned the title of smallest 35mm camera in production at the time [ more on the Rollei 35 can be seen here in our review]. It was this tiny camera which allowed him to blend in, to never give the air of a serious photographer, and which granted him accessibility to people and places without question or query. It was the normality, the civilian nature of a compact 35mm loaded with color film which let him make important work right under the noses of people looking for Leica-clad members of Magnum. This photograph is striking for its intimacy; the subjects appear aware of Shore's camera, but unperturbed by it. The famous figures in the images are captured in an unguarded, human and apparently ordinary moment. Shore's talent for recognizing the value of the everyday and capturing it is clear in this image, which would later serve as a document of an important cultural moment. The lighting, soft yet bright, creates a sense of ethereality, as does the grain of the image, which is particularly apparent in the textured hair and clothes of the figures at the foreground, at once heightening their inaccessibility and their apparent reality in a manner that accords with the mythical status Warhol's Factory and its denizens would attain. When you left the Factory, you began shooting in color, which at the time was widely regarded as a kitschy, banal mode. What prompted that switch?American Surfaces is a series of 312 colour landscape-format photographs depicting vernacular scenes that American photographer Stephen Shore captured while on a dedicated road trip across America in 1972–3. Informal portraits, photographs of city and suburban streets, and images of domestic objects, meals and street signage are all among the subject matter featured in these works, which can be displayed sequentially in smaller groups or as part of the series in its entirety. Ginger Shore, Causeway Inn, Tampa, Florida, November 17, 1977 is indicative of the way in which Shore's work in Uncommon Places developed over the course of the 1970s. This image, taken with an 8 x 10 view camera, is from near the chronological and sequenced end of the series. The image is highly saturated and two-thirds of the picture plane is encompassed by a turquoise swimming pool, patterned with light. This photograph is dominated by diagonals; a silver railing in the foreground leads the swimmer into the pool and the viewer into the image, while the edge of the pool cuts diagonally toward the top of the image, separating a receding set of lounge chairs and another body of water. At the centre of the image is a woman, with wet hair, standing in the pool, looking away from the camera, dressed in a royal blue bathing suit. From here, it’s going to feel like I’m skipping forward for a moment. The American Surfaces series was shot between 1972 and 1973, but it wasn’t published as a proper book until 1999 – nearly three decades later! Before this, it existed merely as a gallery exhibition. Shore was just 24 years old at the time he took these images, yet served another full lifetime in this respect when the book was eventually published at age 51. At the time that this series became a book, his life – and his career for that matter – were very different. In the third and final part of our interview with the photographer, he talks about some of the people in the book, rediscovering new/old photos and his favourite shot Shore's expressive use of vivid color is particularly noteworthy in this image. The bright, acidic blue of the swimming pool produces an emotional response from the viewer, linking them with the world of the image whilst refusing to signpost or label particular feelings. The cream skin of Shore's model, Ginger, who would later become his wife, matches the tones of the patio at the edge of the pool, drawing the viewer's attention to the sunlight on her arms and shoulders; the suggestion that it is the side that faces away from the viewer that is bathed in light and that reveals her identity provokes a sense of distance and longing which, in turn, provokes consideration of the moment, now lost, that the camera has captured. Shore's images in Uncommon Places make an argument for its value at a time when it was frequently dismissed as detracting from form and light. It is the repetition of blues and tan tones that serves, in this image, to draw the viewer's attention to the diagonal planes in the image and to the play of light on various surfaces. Shore felt that color provided images with an honesty, allowing him to communicate the experience of seeing as opposed to the translation of the world into a piece of art further separated from it.