Badlands National Monument, South Dakota, July 14, 1973 2008 / 2010

Social landscapes: Badlands National Monument, 1973

Born in New York City in 1947, Stephen Shore has been fascinated by photography since his childhood when he began at the age of seven to take his first pictures and experiment in his dark room. At 14 he brazenly dared to visit America’s photography stalwart, Edward Steichen, who was the curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography collection at the time. Steichen bought three of Shore’s prints for MoMA after the meeting.

A firsthand witness to Pop culture, Shore spent time almost every day between 1965 and 1968 at Warhol’s Factory, documenting in black-and-white the creative artists and musicians there such as the legendary group Velvet Underground, works which he published in his book The Velvet Years.

The selected edition work from 1973 Badlands National Monument shows a poor farmer’s barn in Badlands National Park, South Dakota in front of an impressive mountain range. Shore characterizes a region as one of utter natural beauty and mountains, but it was plagued by locusts in the 1930s and 1940s and then served as army training grounds. The photograph was taken during the decade that Shore spent wrestling with the phenomenon of “social landscapes” and, in the style of photo-realist painters, traversed America seeking out the motels, parking lots, and roadside restaurants that were already a disappearing phenomenon in American architecture and landscape design of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The American Dream was sensibly being transformed into general everyday banality.

During the 1980s Shore turned his attention from urban scenes to landscapes, in which details and material compositions take center stage thanks to strategic lighting and coloration.

Professor of photography at New York’s Bard College since 1982, Shore teaches his students the core of his artistic philosophy: “A photographer solves a picture, more than composes one.”

Characteristic for Shore’s prints is a documentary style tempered with a moderately subjective perspective. He was early to work in color and produces mostly stand-alone works. He stands in a tradition of photographers to make personal photographs from an objective-seeming stance, such as Walker Evans and his photographs of late 1920s America. With this unmistakable style, Shore has also influenced a younger generation of German photographers from Struth to Gursky. Most recently he was awarded the 2010 Culture Prize of the German Photographic Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie).

Christina Wendenburg