STEPHEN SHORE
Church Street and Second Street, Easton, Pennsylvania, 1974
© Stephen Shore / Courtesy Kicken Berlin
Biography
Stephen Shore (American, born 1947) took up photography when he was still a child. At the age of fourteen he sold three of his work to the MoMA in New York through the support of none other than Edward Steichen. In the mid 1960s Shore met Andy Warhol and documented the “Factory” from 1965 to 1967. At this time, he still works in black and white. Soon after attending a workshop with Minor White in 1970, he started working in color and stayed with it ever since. In 1971, at age 24, Shore was the first living photographer in forty years to receive a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
From 1972 he traveled around North America, photographing urban spaces and suburban architecture. These photos were published in such books as “American Surfaces” and “Uncommon Places”, and his work was shown in the “New Topographics” exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester in 1975. The Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster showed a retrospective of his work in 1994, which reflected the growing influence of Shore’s work abroad, particularly in Germany. His traveling exhibition “The Biographical Landscape” was shown in various museums worldwide in the 2000s. In 2017/2018 MoMA held a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of his work. He has been Director of the Photography Program at Bard College in New York State since 1982. In 2010, Shore received an Honorary Fellowship from The Royal Photographic Society in Bristol, UK.
Kicken Berlin, then operating under the name ‘Lichttropfen’ (Drop of Light) in Aachen first showed Stephen Shore’s work in 1975.
