Stephen Shore began photographing in childhood, taking his first surviving image at age twelve and producing work between 1960 and 1965. He produced hard-bitten black-and-white street photographs aligned with Garry Winograd, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, and Robert Frank rather than the later crystalline large-format landscapes that defined his career. Shore's earliest images include a satisfyingly arch self-portrait composed with a headmaster and a creeping shadow. Family support nurtured his interests: an uncle gave a Kodak photo-chemistry set at age six, prompting Shore to recall that the gift "uncovered something that was buried in me."
"But whereas Lartigue concerned himself with boyish subject matter-racecars, flying machines, the choreographed high jinks of his governesses-and the fashionable trappings of the Belle Époque, Shore seems to have barrelled into his adolescence as a fully formed artist. His work in those early days bears little resemblance to the crystalline large-format portraits of lonely American landscapes that would come to define his career."
"Instead, the young Shore is a hard-bitten black-and-white street photographer whose work would have felt most at home in the company of Garry Winograd, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, or Robert Frank. That first picture, for instance, is a satisfyingly arch self-portrait, capturing one of the headmasters from the boarding school Shore attended taking a group photo of a soccer team, and showing Shore's shadow creeping up the edge of the man's coat from behind."
Read at The New Yorker
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