We are profoundly grateful to the Chan family for their extraordinary generosity and their commitment to making Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places accessible to all. Few bodies of work have so decisively changed the course of photography.
In its nearly two-hundred-year history, photography has continuously reinvented itself while being grounded in two earlier discoveries: first, the image projection of the camera obscura; and second, the observation that certain substances are altered by exposure to light. But it's important to remember that photography has never been fully sui generis. Artists working with the photographic medium have often come from other fields: from science, such as William Henry Fox Talbot; from the theater, if you think of Louis Daguerre and his invention of the diorama;