The images in Stephen Shore’s Early Work are early certainly. He took most of the photos between 1960, when he was 13, and 1965, when he was 18. But they’re as thought-about and complex as these taken in his later years. How did he obtain such aesthetic fluency as a teen? Put otherwise: why is it attainable for him to return to those pictures and fail to be repulsed by any trace of amateurishness?
He has written “a pre-history” of the pictures that seems near the top of the e-book. In it, he tells of a remarkably atypical childhood: He was given a Kodak ABC Darkroom Outfit for his sixth birthday, a Ricoh 35 for his eighth, and a replica of Walker Evans’s American Pictures (1938) for his tenth. Within the assiduous, scrupulous prose by which Shore tells of his “entrance into the world of images as an artwork” there may be scarcely a maudlin phrase. In spite of everything, his process, as he takes a retrospective look, is to think about himself much less as a creator of the pictures than an observer of them, a distinction he makes within the textual content. Maybe he’s additionally an observer of his personal distinguished life, which incorporates such acclaims as being the primary residing photographer to have a one-man present on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York, and having his pictures had been bought by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Fashionable Artwork when he was solely 14. Of the people talked about on this “pre-history,” like W. Eugene Smith, Dave Heath, and Jonas Mekas, he notes: “It’s not attainable to disentangle the threads that come collectively to kind a life. However these encounters are all with me immediately.”
An image from Stephen Shore’s e-book Early Work, 2025.
Courtesy the artist and MACK.
These threads embrace a three-year interval spent at Andy Warhol’s Manufacturing facility, the place he realized from observing the Pop artist “within the midst of his artistic course of, repeatedly making aesthetic selections.” A 1965 Warhol self-portrait Shore consists of within the e-book reveals the bespectacled artist from a selfie-like angle, possible sitting on the ground in the course of banter, with shaded eyes and relaxed jaw. He additionally remembers how a friendship with William Dexter—the headmaster of a boarding faculty within the Hudson Valley, who had a darkroom in his home—inspired and deepened his curiosity in images. The earliest {photograph} within the e-book is of Dexter, at a second when he takes {a photograph} of a boys’ sports activities workforce. Shore describes it with a deceptively easy formulation—as “an image of a photographer taking an image of a photographer taking an image”—nodding to the metanarrative of the picture, by which Shore’s shadow rests on the again of his mentor. Considerably symbolically, Dexter raises his fingers in the direction of those that stand behind.
One solution to appraise Shore’s early mastery of approach is to hunt clues in his descriptions of the photographic equipment. “A digicam,” he writes, “doesn’t level on the world however frames it.” He gleaned this perception from the “classicism” of Evans’s work, and shortly went onto compose his early pictures with a mixture of instinct and talent. Rendered in black and white, the settings of most photos are invariably the road, peopled by strangers and their advertent or inadvertent postures. Nothing of their identities or lives is preserved by captions, and this means how otherwise such particulars would have mattered to an older Shore, who, in his e-book of Nineteen Seventies pictures Unusual Locations, consists of names of individuals and areas.
An image from Stephen Shore’s e-book Early Work, 2025.
Courtesy the artist and MACK.
What’s most notable is that the important character of all of Shore’s work is seen in Early Work: his affinity for the unusual allure of a spot, his attraction to dramas that play out in configurations of things and folks in a scene, and his hunch {that a} photographer’s sincere process is to render the world’s floor at a level to which it’s barely much less acquainted. One can say this about photographers on the whole. However Shore’s benefit is that he’s produced wonderful work for thus lengthy, with each the temerity to experiment, and an inclination—as seen in his 2023 memoir on the craft of images, Fashionable Cases—to assume deeply about how pictures work and the way a photographer can have a prodigious style for influences.
When he made the pictures on this e-book, he was an solely youngster. He felt tied to his mother and father however sensed a disconnection from them. Whereas they inspired his curiosity in images, they “by no means actually grasped what was driving me.” What, certainly, was driving him? It’s a query for which there is no such thing as a neat reply in his personal reflections, involved as these are along with his origins and earliest influences. It’s easy sufficient to say that the pictures, of their attentiveness to the American floor, converse for him. Early Work is a set with the texture of a full-circle occasion: Shore’s try to bridge the existential hole between the photographer he hoped to grow to be with the one he’s now. Remarkably, these selves scarcely look totally different.
