Stephen shore - American Surfaces
In 1972 a then twenty-four year old Stephen Shore began a series of road trips across the United States, setting out to photograph the country that he had not previously had much direct exposure to, having seldom left the city of New York where he had been raised. Prone to the lures of nostalgia and custom as a photographer taking such a trip might otherwise be, Shore had been galvanized for this highly self-conscious investigation of the American vernacular by having spent several of his teenage years hanging around no less a cultural initiator than Andy Warhol’s Factory. In time—quite specfically in retrospect, it should be noted—the culled results of several trips made between 1972 and 1974 became a discursive series that Shore called American Surfaces.
By way of simple description, it consisted of hundreds of color photographs depicting a wide variety of subject matter, including but by no means restricted to signs, people, portraits (as differentiated from mere photographs of people), buildings, toilets, food, refrigerators (occasionally empty), interiors, cars, and several dogs. There was structure, but no apparent order, and content, though it refused hierarchy. Rather than messing with the intensive handwork of a darkroom, Shore had dropped the original film off for development at regular retail stores, much in the way one might with pictures from vacation. He then mounted the first exhibition of the series by simply taping the small machine-made prints he got back from the stores onto the walls of a gallery in a large grid. He had borrowed one of Minimalism’s more rigorously established visual forms, though something else was clearly afoot.
By way of simple description, it consisted of hundreds of color photographs depicting a wide variety of subject matter, including but by no means restricted to signs, people, portraits (as differentiated from mere photographs of people), buildings, toilets, food, refrigerators (occasionally empty), interiors, cars, and several dogs. There was structure, but no apparent order, and content, though it refused hierarchy. Rather than messing with the intensive handwork of a darkroom, Shore had dropped the original film off for development at regular retail stores, much in the way one might with pictures from vacation. He then mounted the first exhibition of the series by simply taping the small machine-made prints he got back from the stores onto the walls of a gallery in a large grid. He had borrowed one of Minimalism’s more rigorously established visual forms, though something else was clearly afoot.
Here is a couple more pictures that I got off of google, to give you more of an idea what his pictures are like.. These pictures have been taken in America.