On the road again: Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places: The Complete Works

by Dana Doyle

Fifth Street and Broadway, Eureka, California, September 2, 1974
Copyright Stephen Shore and Aperture Foundation

This summer Aperture released a new, revised edition of Stephen Shore's photographs made during the 1970's, titled Uncommon Places: The Complete Works. The first time Shore's photographs of this period were published was in 1982. That version of Uncommon Places, now a classic, begins with Second Street, Ashland, Wisconsin, July 9, 1973. It is dusk and a handful of people are standing in line to see The Poseidon Adventure at the Bay Theater. It is a street scene, like the majority of what would follow, and the anticipation of those outside, downtown on a summer evening, accentuates the sense of anticipation hoped for in the first pages of such a book. There is a certain playfulness involved in starting out a book of photographs of largely land locked street scenes where, often, quite little is happening, by conjuring memories of an underwater action thriller.

Second Street, Ashland, Wisconsin, July 9, 1973
Copyright Stephen Shore and Aperture Foundation

In the revised volume, Second Street, Ashland, is the second picture. Now the adventure being introduced on the first page is more literal: that of the rambling man, on the road again in America, the place of the endlessly retreating destination. Room 125, Westbank Motel, Idaho Falls, Idaho, July 18, 1973, is a photograph that was not included in the original publication. Further, it is not a street scene. However, the picture clearly implies "the road" with the interior designed to accommodate those traveling along it: the motel, a fusion of motor and hotel in the same formula of snappy, commercial American linguistics that gave us Motown. A bright glow, from a window where the curtains are pulled back, lights the corner of a motel room. The foot of a twin bed is visible pressed up against the window; the bedspread is a fiery floral print in a mixture of orange, brown and yellow; the acidic earth palette that my generation was born into. A pair of feet, comfortably crossed on the bed, is visible from the knee down, clad in jeans and converse. Also visible are a tiny desk and chair, on which sits a tidy little suitcase and a lamp. Bolted to the wall is a TV, and its screen is a gorgeous mixed up refraction of light; it sits on the wall like a turquoise opal. The landscape through the window forms a rectangular glint in the TV glass; a gray strip, parallel to the room the photographer relaxes in, runs through the reflected landscape. This photograph is a self-portrait while on a road trip, or in Shore's case, a decade of road trips. He was on fresh personal territory, but on well trodden cultural territory; by the seventies the road trip had been done before. In fact, it's most iconic flourishings—Robert Frank's The Americans, Jack Kerouac's On The Road, and Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda's Easy Rider—predated the seventies.

Room 125, Westbank Motel, Idaho Falls, Idaho, July 18, 1973
Copyright Stephen Shore and Aperture Foundation

The new edition of Uncommon Places is what Shore refers to as "the photographic equivalent of a director's cut."1 Here the emphasis on streetscapes, which the 1982 version is famous for, is diluted somewhat, and portraits, interiors and what you might call still lifes, become more prominent themes. Compared to anything previously available on Shore, this volume is remarkably comprehensive. There were 49 plates in the 1982 version, now there are 160 full page images as well as previously hard to get glimpses into Shore's work leading up to 1973. Most notable are 12 images from American Surfaces, a photographic diary made during a trip across the country, to Amarillo, in 1972. It is a series which frequently portrays the formal splendor in the sticky, sweaty, generally abject details of his travels. For example, on the greasy surface of a white ceramic plate (painted with green flowers) sits a fried egg, singed and crusty around the edges, with a brownish yellow yolk; this tableau sits on a shadowy, atmospheric surface of grey-blue formica. Also of interest are three full color reproductions of pages from the journal Shore kept in 1973. Meticulous records of his first solo trip with his view camera, the pages give the impression that Shore was in his element out on the road: keeping peculiar lists, gathering souvenirs, infiltrating postcard racks with his own imitations of generic scenes of Amarillo, essentially engaging with the passing events as if the road were some sort of conceptual candy store.

Lee Cramer, Bel Air, Maryland, 1983
Copyright Stephen Shore and Aperture Foundation

In the late 1960's William Eggleston subverted photographic tradition by embracing color film and irregular compositions reminiscent of snapshots. The prints I have seen by Eggleston (which include many of his iconic images now traveling in an exhibit titled "Los Alamos"), lose their resolution when you get within a few feet.2 The fuzziness of the print echoes the implication of amateur work already knowingly signified, at the time, by color film and the snapshot aesthetic. Shore's prints, less than half the size of Eggleston's, are meticulously crisp in comparison. In his Uncommon Places, Shore tweaks Eggleston's subversion: he similarly embraces color film and vernacular subject matter, however he brings the full arsenal of traditional photographic craft to bear on what was popularly considered unworthy subject matter for the art photographer. His photographs signify preciousness and banality simultaneously. The combination of elements employed by Shore set a precedent for the some of the explorations (in the late 80's and 90's) of photographers (particularly Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, both of whom also use large format view cameras) trained in the Dusseldorf based Becher school. Bernd and Hilla Becher are frequently cited fans of Shore's work.

Sixth Street and Throckmorton Street, Forth Worth,
Texas, June 13, 1976
Copyright Stephen Shore and Aperture Foundation

The introductory essay by curator Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen lays out a linear, and altogether too tidy, interpretation of Shore's conceptual development, which he argues, is visible in the formal structure of Shore's pictures. Unfortunately, he seems willing to invest the formal structures he describes with greater powers than they actually merit, and it is sometimes hard to follow how he intends for his formal analyses to add up. In a brief statement in the 1982 version, Shore explains that: "a picture happens when something inside connects, an experience that changes as the photographer does. 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."3 While Shore's brief comments (22 years ago) may have fallen short of accounting for the level of conceptualism he was engaged in, Schmidt-Wulffen's essay amounts to an over-correction. He sees Shore's central project as relating to identity, explaining that "all his works since American Surfaces [the work just prior to Uncommon Places] may be read as an implicit definition of identity."4 In the introduction to William Eggleston's Guide, the catalog of a show of Eggleston's photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, John Szarkowski explains, "To me it seems that the pictures reproduced here are about the photographer's [Eggleston's] home, about his place, in both important meanings of that word. One might say about his identity."5 Szarkowski's take on Eggleston relates to Schmidt-Wulffen's on Shore; however, what seems to be missing in Schmidt-Wulffen's essay is place in the other sense of the word; place in terms of the American built environment, which, while more obvious, or perhaps because it is so obvious, merits as much critical attention as issues of individual identity.

U.S. 93, Kingman, Arizona, July 2, 1975
Copyright Stephen Shore and Aperture Foundation

"Hardly any attention—none, actually—is paid to Warhol's influence on you. You spent time in the factory from 1965 to 1967;"6 that he did, which Lynne Tillman who begins their 'conversation' with this comment, knows well. She collaborated with Shore—interviewing the players and writing the text to accompany his photographs—on his book The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory, 1965-1967. The amicable relationship between the two benefits the reader. A wealth of insights are conveyed through their discussion, which meanders from Warhol, through Shore's early work (which Tillman coins his "youthful Warholian period,")7 to a number of opportunities for Shore to simply talk about what he recalls being concerned about. "Now I remember something that I'd forgotten for years:" realizes Shore in one of the insights we are privy to; once, he recalls, "I wore a jumpsuit for the entire trip."8 This discussion, in its open format, communicates, much more convincingly, an impression of the times, the concerns and the person who made these photographs.

This new edition should definitely bring a new audience to Shore's work. All of the book stores I've looked in recently have it displayed prominently. Part of its appeal certainly has to do with the fact that nostalgia for the road has remarkable commercial persistence. The seventies, in particular, seem to be appealing to people right now. For those who already appreciated this work, this new edition will probably register as delightfully extravagant; it works a bit like a retrospective, reframing, answering questions, fleshing out a fuller story. It is, actually, an entirely different book, and the original will always have a certain Spartan edge. In the original version the whole argument was in the pictures; it offered only two minute segments of text: a quote from Louis Sullivan saying, "To pay attention is to live, and to live is to pay attention . . ,"9 and the brief statement from Shore. A lot is gained in the new edition, but a little something is lost as well. The coherence of the series loosens, and in my opinion, blurs a little more readily with the work of other photographers. But any revision has to generate some nostalgia for the original.

Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California,
August 13, 1979
Copyright Stephen Shore and Aperture Foundation

I recently rented Easy Rider, and the cover of the video reads: 'A man went looking for America, and couldn't find it anywhere.' Shore undoubtedly has better luck. It probably helps that he doesn't go looking for America, he just goes looking for photographs (as many others have done on the road). He labeled the places in his pictures 'uncommon,' without any visible irony, and I would be surprised if anyone looking closely would disagree. He explains to Tillman that "when I got into the car to make one of those trips, part of it was the pleasure I would find in driving for days on end, . . . I found that it put me in a particular state of mind just seeing this landscape passing by the windshield for hours and hours,"10 a state of mind that apparently nurtured uncommon attention.

Works Cited: Eggleston, William. William Eggleston's Guide. With an Introduction by John Szarkowski.
New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1976.
Shore, Stephen. Uncommon Places. Millerton: Aperture, 1982.
________. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works. New York: Aperture, 2004.

publication date: September 2004