In 1972, Stephen Shore set out on a series of road trips across America with a Rollei 35 camera to explore the country through the eyes of an everyday tourist. The resulting project, “American Surfaces,” refers to the superficial nature of his brief encounters with places and people. This 2005 Phaidon edition brought together the largest selection of images from the series to date, sequenced in the order they were documented. By using simple Kodak lab processing, Shore created a visual diary that challenged the formal black-and-white traditions of the time, documenting a consumer-orientated world with cool objectivity.
