Published originally in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary bookUncommon Places has influenced more than a generation of photographers. Shore was one of the first artists to take color beyond the realm of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the vernacular American landscape lies at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past forty years.
Uncommon Places: The Complete Works presents a definitive collection from the series, and over the span of a decade it has become a contemporary classic. Now, for this lavish reissue, the artist has added twenty more images along with a statement about the rediscovery of photographs that had never before been printed and what it means to expand a classic series.
Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a previously unarticulated vision of America through the road and the camera. By approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore preserves precise internal systems of gesture in composition and light, through which an empty parking lot, a hotel room, or a building on a side street take on an archetypal aura and an ambiguous personal significance. In contrast to the characteristic landscapes with which Uncommon Places is often associated, this expanded survey reveals equally remarkable collections of interiors and portraits.
An essay by the distinguished critic and curator Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, along with a conversation with Shore by fiction writer Lynne Tillman, examines his methodology and traces its roots in the Pop and Conceptual art movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The texts are illustrated with reproductions from Shore’s earlier series American Surfacesand Amarillo: Tall in Texas.
