"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."
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."
Read at The New Yorker
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