Photographer
Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore (born 1947 in New York City) is an American photographer celebrated for his pioneering use of color and his attention to the banal details of everyday American life. His seminal works, including Uncommon Places and American Surfaces, reshaped the status of color photography within fine art. In 1971 he became the first living photographer since Alfred Stieglitz to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he later participated in the influential New Topographics exhibition. Shore has received major recognitions such as a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975) and an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society (2010). Since 1982 he has directed the Photography Program at Bard College.
The Mental Image
Early Work
Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape
Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography (Expanded Edition)
Steel Town
Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979
American Surfaces: Revised & Expanded Edition
Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973–1981
Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places: The Complete Works
Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places: The Complete Works
Stephen Shore: Survey
American Surfaces
One Picture Book #43: Merced River
Selected Works & Key Projects
A source-backed introduction to individual photographs and significant bodies of work.
Key projects
Project · 1972–1973
American Surfaces
American Surfaces is Shore’s extensive color record of everyday movement through the United States in 1972–73. Using a small camera and modestly scaled prints, he photographed meals, rooms, faces, roads, businesses, signs, and other ordinary encounters as a cumulative visual diary. MoMA describes more than 300 pictures as a photographic road movie in which apparent banality yields humor, pathos, and a sustained inquiry into photography itself. It merits selection because the project made serial attention to daily life and vernacular color central to Shore’s mature practice.
View source ↗Project · 1973–1982
Uncommon Places
Begun in 1973 and completed nearly a decade later, Uncommon Places revisited the American world of American Surfaces with an 8-by-10-inch view camera. MoMA identifies its shift toward fewer close details, more detached pictures, and a contemplative response to a landscape being reshaped by suburban expansion. Exhibited in the United States and abroad before its 1982 book publication, the series made Shore a prominent figure in American New Color photography. It merits selection as the project in which technical precision, spatial structure, and ordinary American sites became inseparable.
View source ↗Project · 1965–1967
The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965–1967
The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967 gathers photographs made during Shore’s time around Andy Warhol’s Factory. MoMA’s retrospective frames this early period within Shore’s larger career, while its collection includes portraits and scenes of Factory figures including Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, and Warhol. The project merits selection because it is an unusually direct visual record of a defining New York art-world milieu and establishes the early black-and-white work from which Shore later moved toward conceptual seriality and color photography.
View source ↗Selected photographs
1972 · New York City, New York, United States
New York City
This October 1972 chromogenic print is one of the 229 photographs from Shore’s first cross-country road trip acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art after their first full presentation in 1974. The Met explains that Shore included what he ate, places he stopped, and people he encountered, then printed the color film in the colloquial manner of drugstore snapshots. It merits selection as a documented example of American Surfaces’ decisive use of vernacular scale and color to make ordinary experience an integrated photographic subject.
Work source ↗1974 · North Adams, Massachusetts, United States
Holden Street, North Adams, Massachusetts, July 13, 1974
Shore identifies this 1974 color photograph as part of Uncommon Places. In MoMA’s audio commentary, he explains that the work tests how a complex three-dimensional place is translated into a flat, bounded photograph: a lamppost and building appear precisely related despite their actual separation. He also connects the image to the meeting point of a New England industrial town and the surrounding countryside. It merits selection because it explicitly joins the formal spatial questions and cultural observation that define the large-format project.
Work source ↗1974 · Ogunquit, Maine, United States
Lookout Hotel, Ogunquit, Maine, July 16, 1974
MoMA holds this 1974 chromogenic print, printed in 2013, in its collection. It was selected as the lead image for the museum’s 2017–18 Stephen Shore survey, an exhibition that traced Shore’s work from teenage gelatin-silver prints to digital platforms. The photograph merits selection not merely as a motel image but as a museum-chosen entry point into the retrospective: it places an ordinary lodging site within the large-format color phase through which Shore became associated with direct, unglamorous views of American popular culture.
Work source ↗1975 · Los Angeles, California, United States
Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975
For this 1975 photograph, Shore used an 8-by-10-inch camera rather than the small 35 mm camera employed in his preceding series. In his MoMA commentary, he says the larger negative enabled a highly detailed, complex field in which viewers can direct their own attention. He distinguishes psychological clarity from mere sharpness and associates it with picture organization and crisp daylight. It merits selection because Shore himself uses it to articulate the technical and perceptual program behind his large-format color work.
Work source ↗1979 · Yosemite National Park, California, United States
Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California, August 13, 1979
This large chromogenic print records the Merced River in Yosemite National Park on August 13, 1979. MoMA lists it among Shore’s holdings at a scale of nearly 36 by 45 inches and identifies it as a gift of the artist. It merits selection as a major late image from the Uncommon Places period: within a project otherwise associated with built American environments, this museum-scale river view demonstrates the same commitment to expansive, carefully organized color description in a national-park setting.
Work source ↗-
1960
Collection acquisition
Early photograph made in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Met dates Shore’s photograph New York City, New York to 1960 and recounts that, after receiving a camera at age nine, he made black-and-white photographs and developed and printed them in his own darkroom.
Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Verified Sep 3, 2026
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1962
Collection acquisition
Edward Steichen purchases Shore’s photographs for MoMA
MoMA’s Shore audio guide identifies documentation of Shore’s meeting with Edward Steichen in 1962. The Met further records that Steichen purchased three of Shore’s prints for MoMA’s Study Collection when Shore was fourteen.
Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Verified Sep 3, 2026
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1971
Exhibition
One-person exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
303 Gallery states that, at age twenty-three, Shore became the first living photographer to have a one-person exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Source: 303 Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026
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1972–1973
Series
American Surfaces
Shore made American Surfaces while travelling in the United States. MoMA describes more than 300 photographs that operate as a visual diary and record his passage through everyday places, objects, and encounters.
Source: The Museum of Modern Art Verified Sep 3, 2026
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1973–1982
Series
Uncommon Places
MoMA dates the project from 1973 to nearly a decade later and identifies the move to a large-format camera as central to its more detached and contemplative treatment of the American landscape.
Source: The Museum of Modern Art Verified Sep 3, 2026
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1982
Photobook
Uncommon Places published
303 Gallery identifies Uncommon Places as Shore’s 1982 book and states that it became a major reference for younger photographers working in color.
Source: 303 Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026
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Since 1982
Career milestone
Director of Bard College’s Photography Program
303 Gallery records Shore’s Bard College appointment from 1982 onward as Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts and director of the Photography Program.
Source: 303 Gallery Verified Sep 3, 2026
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November 19, 2017–May 28, 2018
Exhibition
Stephen Shore at MoMA
MoMA presented a career survey of Shore’s work, spanning his teenage photographs through contemporary digital-platform work. The museum described it as the artist’s first New York survey to include his entire career.
Source: The Museum of Modern Art Verified Sep 3, 2026
Collection
The Museum of Modern Art
MoMA’s online artist record lists 197 Shore works online and documents his exhibitions, audio program, and collection works.
Verified 2026-09-03The Museum of Modern Art
Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Met’s online collection search returns works by Shore, including photographs from his 1972 road-trip body of work and early black-and-white photographs.
Verified 2026-09-03The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Representation
303 Gallery
303 Gallery maintains an artist page, selected works, exhibition history, and biography/CV for Stephen Shore.
Verified 2026-09-03303 Gallery
Other institution
Bard College
303 Gallery records Shore’s position at Bard College from 1982 onward as director of the Photography Program and Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts.
Verified 2026-09-03303 Gallery
Alone With Baseball: Stephen Shore’s Minor Leagues (opens a new site)
Peter Schjeldahl’s Aperture essay considers Shore’s Minor Leagues photographs and their departure from standard sports imagery.
Stephen Shore: American Surfaces (opens a new site)
MoMA’s exhibition page discusses American Surfaces as a visual diary and road-movie-like body of photographs made across the United States in 1972–73.
Stephen Shore (opens a new site)
MoMA’s artist profile surveys Shore’s methods and changing media, with collection, exhibition, audio, and publication links.
Stephen Shore: God’s Eye But Human (opens a new site)
In this Louisiana Channel interview, Shore discusses aerial drone photographs of the United States and contrasts drone work with his long use of an 8×10 view camera.
Stephen Shore (S1, E8) | At the Museum (opens a new site)
MoMA’s documentary episode follows Shore during installation of his first full New York career survey and includes a discussion with curator Quentin Bajac.
Stephen Shore Artist Talk (opens a new site)
SFMOMA presents a recording of Shore speaking at the museum on February 23, 2012.
Nick Waplington
Shared publisher: Aperture, MACK
18 photobook(s) in the library
Alec Soth
Shared publisher: Aperture, MACK
13 photobook(s) in the library
John Divola
Shared publisher: Aperture, MACK
11 photobook(s) in the library
Eikoh Hosoe
Shared publisher: Aperture, MACK
8 photobook(s) in the library
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