Stephen Shore

Uncommon Places

Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary ‘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, and his large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past thirty years. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated vision of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore, in these images retains 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.

From 1965 to 1969, Shore spent much of his time documenting the scene at Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York, later described by him as a substitute for college. Warhol roused in the young artist — then in his late teens — an ambivalent interest in commercial everyday culture, in its forms of production and its stereotypes. The method of working in series was crucial for Warhol, as reflected in his choice of techniques such as silk-screening. Ultimately, the many stars produced by the Factory, and photographed by Shore, led the young photographer to believe that identity is something that can be constructed.

In Shore’s early works there are elements of role-play. But it is primarily his journeys, and the ways in which he translates them into photographic sequences, that we may view as constructions of identity. Immersed in documenting the American landscape he ironically began to see himself as an ethnologist, and in keeping, began to wear a safari jacket while photographing. From ‘American Surfaces’ to the various stages of work that comprise the series ‘Uncommon Places’, Shore’s oeuvre repeatedly repositions him anew in his world. Each new photographic strategy Shore employs refers to the identities he assumes in the process. The viewer too is included in this game of repositioning, and thus is made a part of Shore’s constructions of identity.

The series of road trips Shore began taking in the summer of 1972 place him in a role typical of a member of the Beat generation. Born too late to have been a Beat himself, Shore was nonetheless familiar with the writings of Jack Kerouac and road movies like ‘Easy Rider’: the homeless man, in search of himself, adrift in the big, wide world.

‘Uncommon Places’ fits very neatly with developments in pop and conceptual art. This becomes clear if one concentrates more on how Shore constructs and presents time throughout the series than on the precious singular photograph. Taken as a whole, the images provide a throughout map of what amounts to a lifetime of movements in space and time. And through ‘Uncommon Places’ he constructs various identities — publishing pictures in books and showing them in exhibitions allows viewers to step into a specific place defined by Shore. In this way, the audience becomes involved in ‘Uncommon Places,’ which can also be seen as a biographical experiment.

From essay by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen // Stephen Shore. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works. Aperture, 2004