Bringing together more than a hundred photographs taken between 1969 and 2021 in North America, Véhiculaire & Vernaculaire is the first retrospective in Paris in nineteen years of the work of American photographer Stephen Shore.
The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition presents the major series that made the photographer famous — Uncommon Places and American Surfaces — alongside lesser-known projects, never shown in France. A fragment of the Signs of Life exhibition in which Shore participated in 1976 has been exceptionally reconstructed for the occasion. Finally, the photographer’s most recent series, produced using drones, is exhibited for the first time in Europe.
Clément Chéroux, Curator of the exhibition and Director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson writes:
Since the 1960s, mobility has held a central place in the work of Stephen Shore. In 1969, during a trip to Los Angeles, he photographed from the car window. In the 1970s and 1980s, he undertook several road trips across the United States, which would give rise to his two most celebrated series: American Surfaces and Uncommon Places. At the dawn of the new millennium, he once again took images from the car, but also from a train and a plane. Finally, for his most recent project, started in 2020, he photographs the transformations of the American landscape with a drone equipped with a camera. For more than half a century, he has developed a form of vehicular photography.
Throughout its history, North American photography has been very interested in the vernacular: this culture of the useful, the local and the popular so typical of the United States. Shore’s work is crossed by multiple aesthetic or cultural issues. The vernacular is one of them. The different means of transport used by the photographer allowed him to multiply the opportunities for confrontation as well as the points of view of the American way. In the works that have been selected for this exhibition, the vehicle is, in short, placed at the service of the vernacular.
Clément Chéroux
Exhibition Curator and Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
Born in New York in 1947, Stephen Shore began photographing at the age of nine. At fourteen, Edward Steichen bought three photographs from him for the MoMA collections. In 1971, he was the first living photographer to benefit from an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. Shore is one of eight photographers brought together in 1975 in the legendary New Topographics exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester, which redefined the American approach of the landscape. He is part of the generation that led to the recognition of color photography as an artistic form. Rich, diverse and complex, his work strives to transform everyday scenes into occasions of meditation.
Stephen Shore : Véhiculaire & Vernaculaire
June 1 –September 15, 2024
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 rue des Archives
75003 Paris
+33 (0)1 40 61 50 50
www.henricartierbresson.org
@FondationHCB
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog in French published by Atelier EXB.
Stephen Shore — Véhiculaire & Vernaculaire
Atelier EXB
Essays by Stephen Shore and Clément Chéroux accompanied by an interview between the artist and the curator.
22 x 27 cm
190 pages
ISBN: 978-2-36511-399-1
€49
www.exb.fr
