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“Today people look at the pictures… they like it because they’re nostalgic. Well, what my motel room looked like in 1974 looks nostalgic today, but in 1974 it didn’t look nostalgic at all… Some people wonder, ‘This just looks like what things look like,’ and I’d say, ‘Yes! That’s the idea.’” —Stephen Shore
Documentary photographer Stephen Shore (b. 1947, New York City) is as polarizing as he is influential. After being the first living photographer to be given a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1971, critic A. D. Coleman, in a 1972 Village Voice review of Shore’s groundbreaking book American Surfaces, wrote: “Shore seems intent on proving that anyone can photograph as well as he can, and I must admit he’s building an airtight case.”
A pioneer of the use of color photography in fine art, and with now over 25 books and countless accolades to his name, Shore’s piercing photography of the banal is Warholian (Warhol was a friend, boss, and mentor to Shore) in its scope as something of a lingua franca of our Instagram-times. Last week, Shore was awarded the Master of Photography at Photo London 2019, and to honor the recognition Nowness released this video by Victoria Hely-Hutchinson as part of its Photographers in Focus series.
