Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, December 2, 2021: Stephen Shore, an American photographer (#1433)

Thursday, December 2, 2021

Artist of the Day, December 2, 2021: Stephen Shore, an American photographer (#1433)

Stephen Shore (1947) is an American photographer known for his images of banal scenes and objects in the United States, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography.

Stephen Shore was born as sole son of Jewish parents who ran a handbag company. He was interested in photography from an early age. Self-taught, he received a photographic darkroom kit at age six from a forward-thinking uncle. He began to use a 35 mm camera three years later and made his first color photographs. At ten he received a copy of Walker Evans's book, American Photographs, which influenced him greatly. Few teenage boys possess the confidence to approach a pretty girl, let alone the courage to court the Museum of Modern Art. But in 1961, Edward Steichen—the director of MoMA’s Department of Photography at the time, and a revered photographer in his own right—received a phone call from an optimistic fourteen-year-old, by the name of Stephen Shore. “I think I didn’t know any better,” Shore explains today, “I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to do this. So I just called him up and said, ‘I’d like to show you my work.’…He bought three!”

Stephen Shore's work has been widely published and exhibited for the past forty-five years. He was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, forty years earlier. He has also had one-man shows at George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major retrospective spanning Stephen Shore's entire career. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His series of exhibitions at Light Gallery in New York in the early 1970s sparked new interest in color photography and in the use of the view camera for documentary work.

More than 25 books have been published of Stephen Shore's photographs including Uncommon Places: The Complete Works; American Surfaces; Stephen Shore, a retrospective monograph in Phaidon's Contemporary Artists series; Stephen Shore: Survey and most recently, Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979 and Stephen Shore: Elements. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art published Stephen Shore in conjunction with their retrospective of his photographic career. Stephen also wrote The Nature of Photographs, published by Phaidon Press, which addresses how a photograph functions visually. His work is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; and Sprüth Magers, London and Berlin. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

Shore photographed fashion stories for Another Magazine, Elle, Daily Telegraph and many others. Commissioned by Italian brand Bottega Veneta, he photographed socialite Lydia Hearst-Shaw, filmmaker Liz Goldwyn and model Will Chalker for the brand's spring/summer 2006 advertisements.

Shore has been the director of the photography department at Bard College since 1982. In recent years, Shore has been working in Israel, the West Bank, and Ukraine.

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