Uncommon Places: The Complete Works

From Publishers Weekly
A teenaged photographic aspirant who hung around at Andy Warhol’s factory in its mid-60s heyday, Shore found success early: his first show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was held when he was only 23. These 152 full-page, full-color shots comprise his serial project of the 70s, "Uncommon Places," which documented roadside America with a dispassionate, Andy-like emptiness. It’s an aesthetic that has been endlessly co-opted by American filmmakers like Gus Van Sant and Jim Jarmusch, but some of these 12 7/8" × 10 5/16" shots of prairies, parking lots, polyester-clad couples and plastic hotel furnishings manage to seem fresh nonetheless. Shore’s concluding interview with Lynn Tillman makes the Warhol connection explicit, and argues for a kind of meaning-making from the void: "Formalism often sounds like a kind of visual nicety, but if I use it, that’s not how I mean it." Beautiful, lush reproductions with minimal captions allow the photos to speak for themselves.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Description
Originally published by Aperture in 1982 and long unavailable, Stephen Shore's now legendary book Uncommon Places has influenced a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography. Uncommon Places--his visionary series of images of the American vernacular landscape of the seventies and early eighties--stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past three decades.

Uncommon Places: The Complete Works presents an expanded, definitive collection of the early work of this major artist, much of which has never before been published or exhibited. In 1972 Shore set out with a friend for Amarillo, Texas and--like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him--discovered a hitherto unarticulated vision of America via highway and camera.

Shore approaches his subjects with cool objectivity, the photographs seemingly devoid of drama or commentary. Yet each image has been distilled, retaining precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which a parking lot emptied of people, a hotel bedroom, or a building on a side street assumes both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. In contrast to Shore's signature landscape images, this new, expanded survey of the original series reveals equally substantial collections of interiors and portraits.
Shore's broad influence can be seen today in the work of countless contemporary photographers--Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Catherine Opie among them. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works provides an opportunity to reexamine the diverse implications of Shore's groundbreaking project and offers a fundamental primer for the last thirty years of large-format color photography.


About the Author
At the age of 24, Stephen Shore became the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Among his numerous other one-man shows, Shore has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. He has received several awards for his photography including two National Endowment for the Arts Grants and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. He has been the Chair of the photography department at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. since 1982.



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Shore established the standard for large-format color photography of the vernacular landscape. He shot the 163 images here on a series of trips across North America between 1973 and 1979. What would otherwise be dismissed as ordinary becomes a study in random placement within a built environment as we share the carefully chosen viewpoint that Shore selected for his cumbersome camera. We also share his understanding that each photograph has clipped the reality that rambles beyond the frame. The original 1982 edition offered 49 images selected from the hundreds that Shore shot in the 1970s. This volume more than triples the number, giving us a richer view of what Shore saw and recorded so carefully in color. Groundbreaking three decades ago, this body of visual reporting on mostly quiet places remains no less important today. Highly recommended. David Bryant, New Canaan Lib., CT Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.


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