Photography Exhibition Stephen Shore

The exhibition is broadened beyond the major works American Surfaces and Uncommon Places from the 1970s and 1980s and draws upon his first street photos from the early 1960s and his images of the Factory and Andy Warhol in the late 1960s. It also covers his most recent productions like his landscapes, his self-produced books, and his Instagram account. Above all, it brings about something refreshing when it seems to digress. The two spaces dedicated to his commissioned work and to his teaching work clarify the biographic account a little more. The choice to present images from American Surfaces in their original hanging– without a frame, in small-format, simply adhered to the wall– returns to them a welcomed simplicity. The section dedicated to the excellent exhibition All the meat you can eat from 1971 seems to be a relatively easy retrospective reading (we can already detect Stephen Shore’s taste for the banal and amateur photography), but it has the merit to think of the transition between his conceptual period and his vernacular production, far from the cliché of the “rupture”.

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