In more than 60 years of his photographic career of exploring images, Shore has constantly been reinventing his own style of photography, whether it was in the early 1970s with a 35mm camera and color film to create the famous "American Surfaces"; or from 1970s to mid-1980s with a large-format camera to complete the project "Uncommon Places " that has become a "bible of color photography"; or his work of landscape, portrait, and archaeology in the 1990s; print-on-demand photography books and large-scale images of people in the street in the early 2000s; and the latest work entitled "Topographies" made with a drone in 2020-22. He never sticks to a single style but sees each image as a problem to be solved, and he continues to push himself forward.
Shore has always explored different ways of seeing and photographic techniques, shooting and printing processes, as well as themes and media. He is one of the pioneers in using color as an integral and organic element together with shape, plane, texture, line, shadow, object, people, perspective and moment to produce images of American cultural and social landscapes. He finds the unusual in the appearances of these ordinary things, scenes, and people. He does not just want to celebrate the beautiful colors that exist in nature, but to discover the relationships he experiences between color and other elements in the real world, which in turn creates new metaphors and aesthetics that color photography could produce. Together with several other photographers, he has contributed to making color photography as a fine art medium. He is the only photographer to straddle the genres of "New Color Photography" and "New Topographics Photography".
Despite his great achievements at a very early age, Shore has been continuing to utilize emerging technological innovations, such as digital photography, social media, iPhone camera and drone. The result of this constant change of experimentation is that Shore's work is hard to define. However, his seemingly simple but rigorously composed images, made in a state of "heightened awareness," require the viewer to stop and gaze in order to appreciate their structure, depth, illusion, surprise and even humor, as well as their cultural and social contents under the surfaces. Shore's work has influenced generations of photographers, making him one of the most influential photographers since the second half of the 20th century. In an era when artificial intelligence can generate technical images based on human cues, the images created by Shore through his special vision developed by long-term exploration are even more precious, and with the passage of time, people are feeling more and more "the enduring present" value of his work.
American Surfaces
In the spring of 1972, Shore, who grew up in New York, decided to avoid the big cities he was familiar with and drove himself to unfamiliar towns in the interior of the United States. Instead of documenting the major events taking place within the country in the form of photojournalism, he observed and photographed his daily life, the street scenes and people he met, and made a detailed diary. Afterward, he sent the films to a Kodak lab to be printed. In the fall of the same year, Light Gallery in New York exhibited more than 200 of Shore's 5-inch color glossy photos, which were glued directly to the wall in three rows. Entitled American Surfaces, the show was met with an overwhelmingly lukewarm response from the audience, and even the critics couldn't get their heads around it. Although the work did not regain the attention until 1999, when it was published as a book, it is now considered a groundbreaking project in the history of American photography and a paragon of the "New Color Photography".
Shore photographed the cultural and social landscapes along the way, as well as all the details of life on the road, and created the project in the form of a visual diary and snapshots. The format of snapshots and the way they were displayed in a grid format were a deliberate decision and gesture made by Shore as an artist. This "intentionality" distinguishes this work from domestic snapshots and suggests that everything can be photographed, eschewing the artifice and pretense that art photography can produce. He seeks to make photographs that are seemingly random but real, and to give the elements of a subject equal importance in the image.
Shore believes that it is easy for the camera to capture the surface of a subject because the camera lens sees the light reflected on the surface of the thing. When he photographed the people he encountered, he also photographed them as cultural representations of their time. But the apparent is a bridge to the real, and there is something deeper beneath the surface. Shore didn't just want to photograph the street scenes of American towns, but rather quintessential street scenes that were culturally distinctive to the country at the time. American Surfaces can bear witness to the characteristics of that era and is a work that is ahead of its time. It even has contemporaneity by foreshadowing the nine-image grid format of presenting scenes in our life on current social media.
Uncommon Places
After exhibiting American Surfaces, Shore discovered that the Kodak color negative film he was using was too grainy when enlarged and decided to try a large-format camera to continue shooting. In the summer of 1973, Shore took the 4x5 camera on the road again, this time taking an approach different from the snapshots he used for American Surfaces. He usually stopped at a place of interest and chose where to put his camera, after which he would look by the side of his camera closely at the relationship between the various constituent elements, thinking out the approximate composition before making a final decision using the viewfinder's frame on the ground glass. This method of shooting makes photography more precise and is a process of analysis and contemplation.
When Shore found that the 8 × 10 camera was sharper and better suited to photographing architecture, and he soon decided to continue shooting the project with an 8 × 10 camera. The compositions of the early works of the project were formally complex. Shore always wanted to show perspective as far as the eye could see, and the composition of the various objects in the frame. Through this method of observation, he brought order to the chaotic world outside. Later on, he realized that this method was too conventional and complicated. After 1976, he adopted the scattered perspective method of composition to focus more on experiencing his feeling of presence. From 1977 onwards, he attempted to capture moments with a large format camera by using the same method he used for his 35mm camera. This shows that Shore's creative process is one of constant experimentation and problem solving.
Although Shore still used a large format to capture still life indoors when shooting the project, most of the work was outdoor street scenes and people. He also paid attention to both the composition of color, line, and perspective in his work, as well as to reflecting the culture of the American hinterland in that era. He believes that ordinary towns better reflect the true face of American culture, and that color photography is more expressive of the colors of the time. John Szarkowski, in evaluating Shore's work, pointed out that Shore's photography "is very classical in spirit, very quiet, very poised .... Not boring, not empty—but suspended". In 1982, the project's work was assembled in a volume entitled Uncommon Places. This work has contributed to pushing modern photography into contemporary photography.
Elements
The photos of the Elements series are Shore's tribute to Walker Evans, and they are included in a book of the same name published in 2019 by Eakins Press in the United States. In 1966, the same publisher published a book of Evans's photographs titled Messages from the Interior, which contained only 12 images. John Szarkowski praised Evans’s book as " A work of art—brilliantly conceived; surely sets a new standard against which serious photographic books will be measured. "
Shore's Elements book of 24 images includes color and black-and-white natural landscapes taken near his home in New York State, as well as black-and-white images of archaeology, color images taken abroad of local people and their daily lives, and natural landscapes, spanning more than ten years from 1984 to 1997. The series is a new challenge that Shore set for himself after completing Uncommon Places. The challenge was to visualize and produce works with a sense of spatial depth through the basic elements of photography and mental images.
According to Shore in his book The Nature of Photographs, photographs are organized by the essential elements on the physical, descriptive and psychological levels. He also thinks that vantage point, frame, focus, and time are essential elements for a photographer to determine the content and composition of an image. All these elements are reflected in Shore's work and are left for the viewer to see and contemplate. Evans's images of the United States during the Great Depression have become a collective memory of that era in the country, and Shore's work as a time capsule has also become a collective memory of the cultural and social landscapes of his country since the 1970s, as well as the natural and historical landscapes of the other countries he has photographed.
Topographies
Shore began printing his parents' photographs at 6 with a simple darkroom kit, took photographs with a Ricoh rangefinder camera at 9, had three photographs in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York at 14, began taking photographs in Andy Warhol's studio at 17, and had a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City at 23. After making such achievements, Shore did not stop exploring photography. He began taking color snapshots with a simple camera featuring the head of Mickey Mouse, which laid the groundwork for his American Surfaces series done with a Rollei 35 camera in the following year. After shooting Uncommon Places with a Crown Grafic 4x5 and a Deardorff 8x10 large-format camera, around 2003 he began working with a digital camera and in 2014 he started using an iPhone to take photos of his daily life, which he then uploaded to Instagram. Despite using both a digital camera and a cellphone camera, he is able to show the effects of his work done with a large-format camera.
In 2020, Shore, 73, used a DJI drone made in China with a Hasselblad L1d-20c camera to create the project Topographies. After experimenting with a variety of cameras, mediums, and angles to capture natural, social, and cultural landscapes in the United States, this time he made aerial photos of various parts of his country with a drone below an altitude of 122 meters allowed by the Federal Government. Unlike the overhead angle used by most photographers who shoot with drones, Shore was shooting mostly at a 45-degree angle. This height and angle are just enough to see exactly what's on the ground, while avoiding an overly abstract effect. He still chose to photograph small towns in the interior of the country, the urban-suburban interface, as well as natural landscapes altered by human activities. Although no one is largely visible in the photographs, there is always a sense of human presence. As always, Shore does not obviously make value judgments about these landscapes, nor does he make aesthetics the primary purpose of his photographs.
Nonetheless, a closer look at the photos of these seemingly ordinary landscapes reveals that they follow on from Shore’s previous work in terms of subject matter and formal composition. At the same time, he photographed landscapes from a new perspective, that is difficult to see with the naked eye and the camera on the ground, making it possible for the viewer to see more clearly the results of the American towns from their historical, social, cultural, legal, and customary practices. These images are reminiscent of American photographer Timothy O'Sullivan's exploration photography of the American West in the 19th century, Walker Evans's images of the social and cultural landscapes in the Southeastern United States, and the New Topographics Photography created by photographers such as Robert Adams. These photographs have gone down in history as belonging to the Transcendentalist tradition of finding the extraordinary in the quotidian existence, pioneered by American writer Emerson and poet Whitman.
