Like Eugene Atget or Walker Evans, the views of Stephen Shore (born in 1947) show the ordinary, street corners, parking lots, charming houses, an almost empty shop window, petrol stations, hotel rooms. The photographer thus collected images from all over the country: Florida, California, Texas, Montana, Ohio, Arizona … and even Canada. The work aims at emotion, mainly through color and construction. During the preparation of Uncommon Places, Shore also took with him a 35mm Leica camera. A welcome counterweight to the heavy and tedious large format camera that he usually uses, the Leica allowed Shore to take an instinctive and direct photograph – qualities that he liked at first sight in the photographic universe from the adolescence. Shore approached large format photography in the same way, seeking to reproduce the immediate sensation of his 35mm images. When he discovered these photographs years later, Shore was struck by the strangeness that emanated from them: the difference between the aspect ratios was close to what separates two musical keys. These Leica photographs depict an America that is both familiar and typical, revealing a world beyond the frame. Published by the British publishers Mack, Transparencies brings together these original Kodachrome slides, which present an original vision of this pivotal moment in photographic history and reflect Shore’s innovative approach to subject matter and color. This magnificent 192-page book is now available on the Mack editions online store.
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