Saturday, July 28, 2018

Stephen Shore Hardcover – November 21, 2017 by Quentin Bajac (Author, Editor), David Campany (Author), Kristen Gaylord (Author), Martino Stierli (Author), Stephen Shore (Photographer) (The Museum of Modern Art)



This is as comprehensive as it currently gets in regard to a review of Shore's career. Beginning in his youth with a gift of a Kodak developing kit and continuing to the present (2017), we are treated to a taste of all Shore's projects. Admittedly, some of his work is not very interesting to me personally but that doesn't prevent me from giving the book a full 5 stars as an insightful career retrospective. There can be no doubt about Shore's work influencing generations of young photographers and having an impact on the art in a global sense. Reproductions are mostly excellent and the text is informative albeit sometimes longwinded as is usual for these types of books.

Organized into 60 thematic sections, this magisterial volume provides a complete overview of Shore's career―from the early portraits of Warhol's Factory to his latest Instagram images

One of the most influential photographers of our time, Stephen Shore has often been categorized as one of a group of artists of the 1970s who captured American popular culture in straightforward, unglamorous color images. While this is true, it is only part of the story: Shore has worked with many forms of photography, switching from cheap automatic cameras to large format in the 1970s, pioneering the use of color film before returning to black and white in the 1990s, and, in the 2000s, taking up the opportunities offered by digital photography, digital printing and social media.

Published to accompany the first comprehensive survey of Stephen Shore’s work in the US, this catalog reflects the full range of his contribution, including the gelatin silver prints he made as a teenager (and sold to The Museum of Modern Art); his photographs of the scene at Andy Warhol’s Factory, in New York; the color images he made during cross-country road trips in the 1970s; his recent explorations of Israel, the West Bank and Ukraine; and his current work on digital platforms, including Instagram.

This book offers a fresh, kaleidoscopic vision of the artist’s extensive career, presenting more than 400 reproductions arranged in a thematic framework, each grouping accompanied by a short but wide-ranging essay. This unique encyclopedia-style format makes visible the artist’s versatility of technique and the diversity of his output, reflecting his singular vision and uncompromising pursuit of photography’s possibilities.

About the Other
At age fourteen, Stephen Shore had his work purchased by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. At seventeen, Shore was a regular at Andy Warhol's Factory, producing an important photographic document of the scene, and in 1971, at the age of twenty-three, he became the first living photographer since Alfred Stieglitz forty years earlier to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has had numerous one-man shows, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. He has received two NEA grants and a Guggenheim Foundation grant. Since 1982 he has been director of the photography program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

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