Stephen Shore After School

"The first of them were shot the year he turned 13. Most went unpublished at the time, although he got a couple into a magazine called U.S. Camera (which eventually evolved into Travel + Leisure), and when he was 14, MoMA bought three prints. Then this body of work sat, boxed up and carried through a life's career, unexamined for nearly 60 years."

"Those later pictures are (to oversimplify things) compositions of signs and curbs and power lines and gas pumps and highways, eerily still, uncannily balanced yet held in tension. They are often depopulated, shot painstakingly on large-format film and in color. (Shore is one of the major pioneers of color photography; before the 1970s, most artists considered it a little tacky, a medium best left to magazines and amateurs.)"

Stephen Shore made black-and-white handheld photographs between 1960 and 1965, beginning at age 13. A few images were published in U.S. Camera and MoMA bought three prints when he was 14. Most of the negatives remained boxed and largely unseen for nearly sixty years until his studio manager began scanning them. Some rediscovered frames include images from the 1964 Democratic National Convention, including a photograph of Bobby Kennedy on a car hood. The early work contrasts with Shore's later 1970s output, which became known for depopulated, precise, large-format color compositions of signage, curbs, power lines, gas pumps, and highways.

Read at Curbed