Stephen Shore

posted by Tessa Lawer December 13, 2014

American photographer Stephen Shore is best known for recording banal scenes of his home country. Throughout the first twenty years of his life he resided mostly in a modest few square miles of Manhattan, New York. Come the early 70s, Shore set off on a road trip to Texas looking out at the landscape from the passenger seat of a friends car. He takes an attentive look at what is very ordinary, and often overlooked, amongst the sprawling American terrain.

I recently came across a selection of Shore’s images within the Constructing Worlds exhibition at the Barbican Centre, and was struck by his filmic use of colour and composition. Being “on the road” is a concept intrinsically linked to American history, and the way Shore has angled and cropped his pictures simulates looking through the frame of a car window. The photographs present a seemingly honest depiction of real life, whilst subtly implying greater meaning.