303 Gallery is pleased to present Stephen Shore: Instagram, a selection of works originating from the artist’s personal social media feed. Presented as unique, dye sublimation prints on aluminum, the artworks preserve the square format and spontaneity of their digital source, while establishing themselves beyond the online platform as physical objects and individual moments to consider.
From the very outset of his practice, Shore has continually challenged the traditional conventions of the photographic medium, pursuing instead pictures that convey the physical act of seeing. A pioneer of color photography and an originator of the snapshot aesthetic, Shore has consistently experimented with various means of popular photography, using Mick-a-Matic, Polaroids, 35mm point-and-shoot cameras, and now his iPhone, in tandem with large-format cameras throughout his career.
Shore’s Instagram feed harkens back to his early 1970s series, “American Surfaces” in which he sought to create a visual record of each day’s mundane experiences. Posting daily since joining the platform in 2014, Shore always adheres to Instagram’s default square format, and engages enthusiastically with the community through comments. His subjects fall under categories common to many users: pets, landscapes, and objects seen on the ground; yet his singular approach to visual thinking is ever present. Recontextualized as individual, physical prints isolated from the surrounds of a feed, the most ordinary scenes reveal their structural underpinnings. Defined by a formal rigor and harmony of light, color and form, the works convey Shore’s enduring motivation: the exploration of new possibilities within the photographic image.
Stephen Shore's work has been widely published and exhibited for the past forty-five years. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major retrospective spanning Stephen Shore's entire career. Recent solo exhibitions include C/O, Berlin; Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid; Aspen Art Museum; South African National Galley, Cape Town; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, PS1, New York; and the International Center for Photography, New York. He has shown extensively in international venues dating back to a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1971, the first solo photography show at the museum. Monographs of Shore's work have been published by Aperture, MACK, Phaidon, and Schirmer/Mosel, among others. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art, Sprengel Museum, and the Library of Congress. 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 lives and works in New York.