Stephen Shore (USA, 1947)

"What I guess goes through my mind when I’m taking a picture is I’m thinking wordlessly about how all these elements relate to each other and I’m thinking again wordlessly about finding a balance that I look for a point that seems central to the picture and when I find that point that tells me where to stand and where exactly to aim the camera.
… A work can hold a lot of different things at once, explore the medium, explore perception and explore other psychological levels. I think all these levels operate through work at the same time so I don’t feel like I need to limit what I’m doing, that I can hold all these things."
Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore was born on October 8, 1947 in New York City. He began photographing at age eight, and at fourteen sold three prints to Edward Steichen (then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). Shore left a Manhattan prep school during twelfth grade, and spent 1965 through 1969 documenting Andy Warhol’s factory. In 1971 the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited Shore’s work in the institution’s first-ever single artist show by a living photographer. In 1976 the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited his color work. Shore is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1975) and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1974 and 1979). The George Eastman House mounted his first retrospective, Stephen Shore: Photographs 1973-1993, in 1996. His work is included in such collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; and Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Shore resumed photographing in black-and-white in 1991, and more recently has begun shooting with a digital camera and printing small iphoto books.
Kendra Greene in Museum of Contemporary Photography