Uncommon Places

Stephen Shore (1947)

Cross-country views of constructed and natural environments, organized through consciously casual large-format color photography in the United States and Canada.

Description

Uncommon Places by Stephen Shore, made during cross-country trips through the United States and Canada from 1973 to 1978, depicts roads, towns, commercial spaces, interiors, people, and landscapes encountered along the way.

The project developed from American Surfaces as Shore shifted from the snapshot's cultural references toward questions of what an image does. A native New Yorker, he encountered unfamiliar territory over repeated journeys rather than a single expedition. His aim joined responsiveness to what he found with a mental structure that could organize it, a method he called "consciously casual." Changing light and the meeting of constructed and natural environments recur, from motel signs and parking lots to a billboard set against Mount Shasta.

Shore's views place signs, utility poles, facades, sidewalks, vehicles, food, and distant terrain in layered arrangements whose perspective lines make apparently casual scenes precise. In some photographs intersections open toward receding streets, in others motels, commercial signage, and parking lots meet rivers, beaches, or the edge of open country. Figures pause, sit, or undertake ordinary actions, and the frame offers several points for the eye to visit rather than directing attention to one subject.

That density came from large-format negatives. Shore made his 1973 photographs with a handheld 4 × 5 Crown Graphic, moving to a tripod by year's end, then began using an 8 × 10 view camera in 1974. Under a focusing hood, he studied the ground glass and adjusted position, lens, aperture, and shutter speed. The deliberate setup, costly color exposures, and longer exposure times encouraged carefully chosen frames and limited rapid movement. Exhibition prints are chromogenic color prints.

Before the title was established, MoMA presented related 8 × 10 travel photographs in Photographs by Stephen Shore in 1976. Aperture's 1982 Uncommon Places, Shore's first monograph and Aperture's first monograph printed entirely in four-color, presented a selection of 49 photographs. Expanded editions in 2004 and 2015 restored interiors, portraits, and rediscovered photographs. Project exhibitions included Berlin in 2010 and the Nevada Museum of Art in 2013. The 2004 edition was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2005, while institutional assessments later linked the work to Düsseldorf and Vancouver photography. The Vancouver Art Gallery presented a project exhibition in 2026, following the Chan Family's gift of 801 Shore photographs.

Behind the work

During the 1973 trips, Shore kept a factual road journal recording details such as miles driven, meals, television programs, and motel bills. It also logged how many copies of Greetings from Amarillo: Tall in Texas, a set of ten postcards he had published in 1971, he left on postcard racks in the towns he passed through.

An 8 × 10 color exposure cost Shore about $20 for film, processing, and contact prints. The expense made him avoid a second exposure unless something had genuinely changed, forcing him to decide exactly what he wanted from a scene.

A lab-processing failure ruined Shore’s original 4 × 5 photographs of Fifth Street and Broadway, Eureka, California. Rather than abandon the image, he returned the following year with an 8 × 10 camera and remade it.

The 1982 book reduced roughly 700 photographs Shore considered interesting to 49, partly because Aperture’s first all-color monograph was expensive to produce. Editor Carole Kismaric initially left out the breakfast photograph and Shore’s close portrait of Ginger Shore, but Shore insisted on both: he could not imagine the book without them.

Quotes by the photographer

"Color film is wonderful because it shows not only the intensity but the color of light. There is so much variation in light between noon one day and the next, between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon. A picture happens when something inside connects, an experience that changes as the photographer does."

"It’s this funny or odd play between being responsive to what one encounters, but having a certain mental framework that digests it."

"I’m interested in the process of how to be consciously casual."

"When the picture is there, I set out the 8 x 10 camera, walk around it, get behind it, put the hood over my head, perhaps move it over a foot, walk in front, fiddle with the lens, the aperture, the shutter speed. I enjoy the camera."

"The word I would use is ‘still’ more than ‘stop.’ There is a sense of timelessness about it."

"Fishing, like photography, is an art that calls forth intelligence, concentration, and delicacy."

Tags and context

Credits: A limited image selection is reproduced for analysis, commentary, and research under Article 24(1)(3) of the Bulgarian Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act. Suggest an Edit