To see something spectacular and recognize it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility - that is what I am interested in.
- Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore’s work has been widely published and exhibited for the past fifty years. He was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, forty years earlier. He has also had one-man shows at George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major retrospective spanning Stephen Shore’s entire career and attracted more than a half-million visitors. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His series of exhibitions at Light Gallery in New York in the early 1970s sparked new interest in color photography and in the use of the view camera for documentary work.
More than thirty five books have been published of Shore’s photographs including Uncommon Places: The Complete Works; American Surfaces; Stephen Shore, a retrospective monograph in Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists series; Stephen Shore Survey and most recently, Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art published Stephen Shore in conjunction with their retrospective of his sixty-year photographic career. Shore has written two books, The Nature of Photographs, published by Phaidon Press, which addresses how a photograph functions visually, and Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography. A Memoir. Published by MACK Books. His work is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; and Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London and Los Angeles. Since 1982, he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard Collefe, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.