Published by MACK in 2025, *Early Work* gathers, for the first time, photographs Stephen Shore made between 1960 and 1965, when he was still in his early teens. The book begins with a formative encounter: at six, Shore received a Kodak Darkroom kit, an introduction to the material processes of photography that helped shape his lifelong curiosity about the camera, development, and the world before him.

These images belong to the years before Shore worked with Andy Warhol at The Factory, yet they are presented not simply as juvenilia or biographical prelude. The publisher describes a period of sustained experimentation in which Shore had already developed a sophisticated understanding of photographic form and an unusually attentive relationship to his surroundings. His subjects and interests register the energy of New York in the early 1960s, while also indicating themes that would continue to occupy him as a photographer.

The significance of *Early Work* lies in the access it provides to an unseen foundation of Shore’s practice. Rather than imposing a retrospective interpretation, the collection allows the photographs’ ambition and alertness to establish the terms of that early vision. For readers familiar with Shore’s later work, it offers a concentrated view of the sensibility taking shape before his public career; for collectors of photobooks, it is a substantial first presentation of material that expands the understanding of an important American photographer’s beginnings.

At 172 pages in hardcover, the volume also includes a new essay by Shore. Its value is therefore both historical and photographic: it records a changing New York while preserving the evidence of a young artist testing what the medium could see, hold, and reveal.