Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places

Published by Aperture in 1982 and long unavailable, Stephen Shore's legendary Uncommon Places has influenced a generation of photographers. Among the first artists to take color beyond advertising and fashion photography, Shore's large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works presents a definitive collection of the original series, much of it never before published or exhibited. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated version of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore's images retain precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which the objects before his lens assume both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. In contrast to Shore's signature landscapes with which "Un-common Places" is often associated, this expanded survey reveals equally remarkable collections of interiors and portraits.

As a new generation of artists expands on the projects of the New Topographic and New Color photographers of the seventies--Thomas Struth (whose first book was titled Unconscious Places), Andreas Gursky, and Catherine Opie among them--Uncommon Places: The Complete Works provides a timely opportunity to reexamine the diverse implications of Shore's project and offers a fundamental primer for the last thirty years of large-format color photography.

Essay by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen. Interview by Lynne Tillman.

Library Journal

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.

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her fiction includes the novels Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt, and No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. Tillman's art and literary criticism has been published in Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Nest, the Village Voice, The Guardian, Bomb, and The New York Times Book Review. She has written stories for the artists' books and catalogues of a variety of contemporary artists, including Kiki Smith, Juan Munoz, Jessica Stockholder, Barbara Kruger, Roni Horn, and Vik Muniz. Her most recent story collection, This Is Not It, appeared in 2002. Tillman's new novel, American Genius, A Comedy, will be published in October by Soft Skull Press.