303 Gallery is proud to present it’s first solo show of Stephen Shore, including selections from the seminal books Stephen Shore: Photographs 1973-1993, Uncommon Places, and American Surfaces, 1972. In the early 1970’s, Shore’s exhibitions at the Light Gallery in NYC introduced a new photographic vocabulary dealing with color and in the use of the view camera for documentary work. At seventeen Shore was shooting in Andy Warhol’s studio, a project that later culminated in the book The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory. His attention to detail and scale and the pristine landscape can be seen as major influences on the last two decades of German photography and on the work of Andreas Gursky, Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, and Paul Graham in particular.
Eleven large scale color photographs will be shown in the front gallery. Piercingly clear views of natural landscape in Texas, Montana and Scotland create a monumental vision that seems other- wordly. Included with the landscapes are several photographs of a campsite, a family vacationing lakeside and a baseball field next to an airport under an expansive sky. Shore’s immaculate sensibility only lends to the complicated intricacy of the landscape, offering among other things the idea of displacement and intrusion of the figure.
The North Gallery holds a wide range of work from his photography book American Surfaces, 1972. In these intimate views of American life from a transient perspective, we see a historical period through the eyes of a traveler, a road trip that moves the viewer into and through towns, restaurants, homes, and hotels of 70’s Americana. Shore’s photographs keep a record of everything from his daily meals, toilets and hotel beds. The viewer observes the environments of people the photographer has met on his travels, void of any human subject. Every so often, we are struck with a haunting portrait that gives a face and an authorship to these common and uncommon environments.