American Surfaces: Revised & Expanded Edition

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This practice not only informed how I photographed but what I photographed. Since I was choosing random moments, I found I was looking at situations that were not usually the subject of photographs: riding in a taxi, standing in an elevator, eating a meal, watching television. This led me to go beyond conventions not only of pictorial structure but of content, too. There are plenty of opportunities these days to see them for yourself. MoMA has devoted half of a gallery in its “XL: 19 New Acquisitions in Photography” exhibit to Shore’s career; in November, the Sprüth Magers gallery in London will also host a curated retrospective; and in early 2014, the Rose Gallery in Los Angeles will show a selection of Shore’s work. VH: You were born in New York City but your journey took you through small-town America. Were you looking to photograph communities that felt familiar to you or those that felt different from where and how you grew up?

In 1972, you chose to present “American Surfaces” unmatted, unframed, and taped to the wall—very Warholian. The approach was met with a scathing reception, but today that sort of casualness seems intrinsic to how we consume images. Do you think people have changed their way of seeing? Shore took this photograph, along with others during his first year working on Uncommon Places, with a 4 x 5 Crown Graphic camera, wishing for greater accuracy with framing and a higher quality image than had been possible with his Rollei, despite the challenges this posed in taking the photographs he desired. This image required Shore to stand on a chair and raise the camera, attached to a tripod, above him on an angle. The apparent simplicity of the image, which erases Shore's authorial presence and the difficulty with which the camera was balanced, is belied by the shapes, lines and framing, all of which reveal the photograph as deeply considered. The diagonal lines of the placemats at the top and right hand side direct the audience's eye into the image, the framing of the pancakes by the plate and placemat marks this area of the image as particularly significant and the interplay of small and large circular items serves to hold the audience's attention and stimulate sustained consideration. 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.After serving as informal house-photographer in Andy Warhol's factory in the late sixties, Stephen Shore came into international prominence with his celebrated first one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1971—the venerable institution's first-ever exhibition of a living photographer. Since then, his work has stood at the forefront of photography's increasingly important relation to contemporary art, pioneering new forms of color photography and conceptualism while preserving an interest in craft and composition integral to the medium since its nineteenth century invention. It’s the bane of my existence that I see photography not as a way of recording personal experience particularly, but as this process of exploring the world and the medium,” Shore told me in his studio. “I have to be reminded, “’It’s your son’s birthday party. Bring a camera.’ And then, when I’m there, ‘Take a picture,’ because it doesn’t occur to me to use it as this memorializing thing.” For more than thirty years Stephen Shore’s photography has managed to stay relevant, always one step ahead of year-to-year movements in contemporary art. VH: Absolutely! Thank you so much for speaking with me and with Phillips. We’re really excited about the new edition of 'American Surfaces.'

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. Shore was a city boy, the only child of prosperous and culture-loving parents on the Upper East Side, and a prodigy, introduced to darkroom technique at the age of six. His mentors included Edward Steichen, who bought prints by him for the Museum of Modern Art when Shore was fourteen. From 1965 to 1967, his nearly daily presence at Andy Warhol’s Factory fostered an aesthetic of seemingly offhand deliberation. Meanwhile, Shore absorbed and gradually transcended formal lessons from the masters of his medium, most notably Walker Evans. He started where others had left off. Shore continued to benefit from the support of the adults around him; at age ten, a neighbor, president of a large music publishing company, gave him Walker Evans's American Photographs, a seminal work of documentary photography that would have a significant impact on Shore's own approach. Shore left the Upper West Side in 1959 to attend boarding school in Tarrytown, New York, where the headmaster, William Dexter, was an avid photographer who encouraged Shore by offering him access to his darkroom. Shore felt that his first successful photographs were taken while in Tarrytown, though he subsequently returned to New York City to attend high school at Columbia Grammar. Shore's photographic work and professional success was undoubtedly informed and assisted by his friendships with many significant postwar artists. His relationships at the Factory, MoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum had developed into a network that included Ed Ruscha, Dennis Oppenheim, Christo and Jean-Claude, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander. In 1973, I brought my first four-by-five work to show John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art. In those days, whenever I produced a new group of pictures I would bring them to John. That day he looked at the work and asked me if I was having fun. I was surprised by this question. I thought, Yes, I was, but I also thought that wasn’t the right answer. So I mumbled something pointless. The next time I brought a new body of work to John, he again asked if I was having fun. This time I said, “Yes.” He puffed on his pipe and said, “Good.” I felt our relationship changed after that. When I brought pictures to him from then on, he never offered advice, and only occasionally made a comment. I had the sense we were engaged in a visual communication—that he was savoring the images and taking them in.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. The Shorean image is often seen as something that disrupts our idea of America, or of what American imagery can be. But when you first set out on your road trips, in the seventies, shooting the work that would become “American Surfaces,” you hadn’t seen much of the country. How did those trips change your notion of what America was? What surprised you? And was there some value to coming at these places as an outsider? Digital photography allowed Shore to return to reclaim some of the casualness and immediacy of American Surfaces without sacrificing the image quality of Uncommon Places. “Cameras are now made that are the size of a 35 mm SLR that can take a picture that has the resolution of a view camera,” he said. “And so that camera that I was looking for in 1972? By 2008 that camera was being made.” Shore has spoken of his interest, across Uncommon Places, in prompting a deeper consideration of the quotidian through joining form with content so as to lose neither the image nor the complexities of North American life. Shore's subject is, as a diner breakfast, found across the United States whilst also, through the detailing of the plate and placemat, being specific to the place in which this example has been found. The references to Native American culture introduce an element of ambivalence to the photograph; they speak not only of the comforts of everyday life, but also of the myths upon which the United States has been built and the ways in which quotidian imagery serves to perpetuate these myths.