American Surfaces: Revised & Expanded Edition

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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. 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.” 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. If this formalism looks forward to the more obsessive serialism of his American Surfaces, where he photographed the food he ate every day and the details of the bland motel rooms he stayed in, there are also street photographs that betray the influence of Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank. A dog in a window next to a huge Stars and Stripes is, at first glance, pure Frank – but there is something more seemingly casual about Shore’s eye.

The short answer: While I may have questions or intentions that guide what I’m interested in photographing at a particular moment, and even guide exactly where I place my camera, the core decision still comes from recognizing a feeling of deep connection, a psychological or emotional or physical resonance with the picture’s content.

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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'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.

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Content inseparable from attention to form. It occurs to me that there’s no such thing as a definitive Steven Shore photograph, except that it’s by default like nothing else. I recognize it, but not as an instance of “style.” It’s more like entry to a zone of immediate experience. I feel a little lost, as I do in my real life. You don’t pin down; you unpin up, if that makes any sense. 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. Reflected in the title of the work, the details recorded in American Surfaces are superficial, yet together they build a bold and insightful portrait of the social and geographical landscape specific to North America at that time. Prior to making American Surfaces, Shore’s work had focused almost singularly on New York, where he grew up. This project marked a formative point in his career when the concept of the road trip became – as it remains – integral to his practice: immediately after finishing this project he began his seminal series Uncommon Places (published 1982). Working in a photographic tradition established by American photographers such as Robert Frank (born 1924) and Walker Evans (1903–1975), in American Surfaces Shore established a new method of recording vernacular scenes of life in North America. The artist has stated that he set out to record ‘everything and everyone’ he came across (Stephen Shore, artist talk, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 23 February 2012, http://www.americansuburbx.com/2012/01/asx-tv-stephen-shore-sf-moma-artist-talk-2012.html, accessed 21 November 2014). His approach – loosely diaristic and serial in nature – together with his non-hierarchical framing of the image and grid-like method of presentation, indicated links with minimalist and conceptual practices of the 1960s and 1970s. 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? 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.”

But this is only part of the story. The question remains: why this particular intersection, on this day, in this light, at this moment? That’s more like what you’ve called instinctive. There’s the sense of something taking over. I found on my road trips that, after a couple of days of driving and paying attention to what I was seeing, I would get into a very clear, quiet state of mind. Analog photography would seem to demand a more considered approach. If you’re shooting a plate of pancakes with an eight-by-ten, you’re forced to be conspicuous, highly intentional. Or is that wrong? Do you think your early photographs could have been shot digitally? 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. Rene Ricard, Susan Bottomly, Eric Emerson, Mary Woronov, Andy Warhol, Ronnie Cutrone, Paul Morrissey, Pepper DavisI went to the view camera really for a simple reason that I wanted to continue with American Surfaces, but I wanted a larger negative to make bigger prints, because film at the time wasn’t very sharp,” he said. Look at the first Uncommon Places photos and the continuity with American Surfaces is obvious: For instance, he shoots his hotel television and bed. Soon, however, the images move away from interior spaces toward large images of neglected architecture, parking lots, and street intersections, . This image, from Shore's best-known series, Uncommon Places, shows a table set for breakfast at what appears to be a diner. The breakfast setting, on a table lined with a lamination imitating wood, is positioned on a diagonal from the camera. It consists of a plate of pancakes, encircled by Hopi petroglyphs, positioned between cutlery atop a placemat showing scenes of Native Americans and white colonizers. Further from the camera, occupying a central position at the top of the frame, is a smaller plate upon which sits a bowl holding half a cantaloupe. To the right are a salt shaker and a pepper shaker, a glass of water with ice and a glass of milk. In the lower left corner, the tan acrylic of the seat below is visible. Shore's images are structured around the experience of seeing, seeking to communicate the way in which the everyday might register to an outsider. He has regularly used his work as a form of visual diary, communicating his own experiences through his photographs. Shore's photographic choices suggest emotional states to the audience, often drawing power through the ways in which light and composition evoke feelings that the viewer cannot name.