and Film, Rochester, New York, explored pho-
tography of the ‘‘man-altered landscape.’’ Curator
William Jenkins brought together the color pho-
tography of Shore with the black-and-white land-
scapes of Joe Deal, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz,
Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon and others to draw
parallels between their photographs. The depopu-
lated landscapes were treated with a detachment
that asserted neither social commentary nor a
strong personal involvement with the subject.
New Topographics photographs characteristically
feature uninflected, descriptive information about
undistinguished places. This detachment contrast-
ed sharply with the more familiar practices embodi-
ed, for example, by Robert Frank’s personal and
charged images of America’s man-made places or
Ansel Adams’s awe-inspired iconic views of natur-
al grandeur.
The fact that Shore was the lone color photogra-
pher among the Topographics group points to his
other major contribution: validation of color among
fine-art photographers. Photographers were slow to
adopt color photographic prints, available since
1935, in any widespread way until a small group of
artists, including Stephen Shore, received attention
for their color photography, beginning in the early
1970s. This new interest in color photography ap-
peared in photographic critic Max Kozloff’s 1975
Artforumarticle ‘‘The Coming of Age of Color’’
and in solo exhibitions of William Eggleston and
Stephen Shore at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, curated by John Szarkowski in 1976.
In 1981, Sally Eauclaire had begun to promote
color photography in a series of books, the first
of which was entitledThe New Color Photography.
Kozloff, Szarkowski, and Eauclaire all featured
Shore’s color work.
Beginning in 1977, Shore photographed in Impres-
sionist painter Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny,
France as part of a project originally commissioned
by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The 1983 pub-
lication,The Gardens at Giverny, shows views of the
gardens, refurbished to reflect the grandeur they
originally achieved during Monet’s life. Shore’s inter-
est in color prints is eloquently described in an after-
word included in a book of his photographs entitled
Uncommon Places, 1982:
Until I was twenty-three I lived mostly in a few square
miles in Manhattan. In 1972 I set out with a friend for
Amarillo, Texas. I didn’t drive, so my first view of Amer-
ica was framed by the passenger’s window.It was a shock. I would be in a flat nowhere place of the
earth, and every now and then I would walk outside or bedriving down a road and the Light would hit something
and for a few minutes the place would be transformed.Color film is wonderful because it shows not only the
intensity but the color of Light. There is so much varia-
tion in Light between noon one day and the next,
between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon.
Shore’s use of color in his photography, in addi-
tion to capturing qualities of light as he does in
images like hisSecond Street, Ashland, Wisconsin,
1973, often emphasizes their formal qualities.
Many of Shore’s landscapes can be read for their
organization of elements: shapes, lines, colors, and
patterns across the surface of the image and within
the edges of the photograph. In this type of a read-
ing, the use of a field of subdued colors and hues is
punctuated by the appearance of small amounts of
intense color as in the reddish-orange on signs and
cars in works such asLa Brea Avenue and Beverly
Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, 1975 to create a
pattern for the viewer’s eye to follow.
InNew Color, New Work, Sally Eauclaire’s analysis
of Shore’s landscape photography of the 1970s points
to a recurrence of open spaces: vacant parking lots,
deserted roads, and empty intersections defined by
thehomes,commercialbuildings,trees,anddistant
mountains that surround them. These intervening
spaces suggest a distance between photographer and
subject, and create a detachment between photograph
and viewer. Eauclaire notes that this distanced quality
in Shore’s work appears in photographs made while
traveling in unfamiliar places throughout the United
States, and she contrasts it to a connection seen in
Shore’s landscapes in places where he has lived.
Since 1982, Shore has directed the Photography
Program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hud-
son, New York. Although Shore is almost com-
pletely self-taught, as a teacher of photography,
Shore has worked to articulate for his students
the various elements of photography’s unique
grammar, vocabulary, and content, including the
publication of a book on this subject in 1998
entitledThe Nature of Photographs.
RebeccaSenf
Seealso:Adams, Robert; Baltz, Lewis; Eggleston,
William; Szarkowski, John; White, MinorBiography
Born Stephen Eric Shore in New York City, New York, 8
October 1947. Attended Columbia University School of
General Studies, 1973; Institute of Fine Arts, New York
University; participated in the Minor White Workshop,
Hotchkiss School, Lakeville, Connecticut, 1970. Instruc-SHORE, STEPHEN