American, b. 1947; lives and works in Tivoli, New York
Stephen Shore is a pioneer in the use of color photography. During various cross-country trips in the 1970s, Shore employed a large-format camera to record bleak American landscapes and seemingly banal subjects, such as a pancake breakfast, to produce an intense reconsideration of everyday American life. Collected in his classic 1982 book, Uncommon Places, these color photographs linked the conventions of snapshot photography to an astute critique of the modernist photographic tradition. But even as a self-taught teenaged photographer, Shore showed surprising perspicacity and sophistication. He became a fixture at Andy Warhol's New York City studio, the Factory, in the mid-sixties and later published his photo documentation of Factory life in Warhol's 1968 monograph. Then, turning to Conceptual art, Shore began exploring sequential imagery and time-based photography. The black-and-white series July 22nd, 1969 consists of a series of snapshots based on a simple premise: Shore shot 1 black-and-white picture at 30-minute intervals for exactly 24 hours, documenting with exquisite precision, in 49 images, a full day in the life of his friend Michael Marsh.
