American Surfaces

About this book

In 1972 Stephen Shore left New York City and set out with a friend to Amarillo Texas. He didnt drive so his first view of America was framed by the passengers window frame. He was taken aback by the fact that his experience of life as a New Yorker had very little in common with the character and aspirations of Middle America. Later that year he set out again this time on his own with just a drivers licence and a Rollei 35 - a point-and-shoot camera - to explore the country through the eyes of an everyday tourist. The project was entitled American Surfaces in reference to the superficial nature of his brief encounters with places and people and the underlying character of the images that he hoped to capture. Shore photographed relentlessly and returned to New York triumphant with hundreds of rolls of film spilling from his bags. In order to remain faithful to the conceptual foundations of the project he followed the lead of most tourists of the time and sent his film to be developed and printed in Kodaks labs in New Jersey. The result was hundreds and hundreds of exquisitely composed colour pictures that became the benchmark for documenting our fast-living consumer-orientated world. The corpus of his work - following on from Walker Evans and Robert Franks epic experiences of crossing America - influenced photographers such as Martin Parr and Bernd & Hilla Becher who in turn introduced a new generation of students to Shores work. The result was hundreds and hundreds of exquisitely composed colour pictures that became the benchmark for documenting our fast-living consumer-orientated world. The corpus of his work - following on from Walker Evans and Robert Franks epic experiences of crossing America - influenced photographers such as Martin Parr and Bernd & Hilla Becher who in turn introduced a new generation of students to Shores work.