Stephen Shore - American Surfaces 1972 - 1999

In 1972, a 24-year-old Stephen Shore left New York City on a road trip toward Amarillo, Texas. Raised in Manhattan and heavily influenced by his teenage years spending time around Andy Warhol’s Factory, Shore was struck by how drastically different the reality of Middle America was from his life in New York. He set out to explore the country through the unpretentious lens of an everyday tourist.
The title American Surfaces refers to the superficial nature of brief encounters with unknown places and people, and the physical surfaces of consumer culture he documented.

The title American Surfaces refers to the superficial nature of brief encounters with unknown places and people, and the physical surfaces of consumer culture he documented.

To keep his pictures feeling "as natural as speaking," Shore intentionally avoided the heavy, complex cameras of fine-art photographers of the time. Instead, he used a handheld Rollei 35—a compact, amateur point-and-shoot camera—often equipped with a simple flash.

Rather than seeking out dramatic landscapes or idealized "decisive moments," Shore turned his camera toward the mundane facets of everyday life. His snapshots captured: Half-eaten diner meals, plates of food, and generic motel rooms; Television sets, toilets, local signage, gas stations, and storefront advertisements; Mask-like faces of strangers, local citizens, and companions he met along the way.

To maintain the conceptual purity of a typical tourist's workflow, Shore did not develop the film himself in an art lab. Instead, he sent his rolls of Kodacolor film to ordinary commercial Kodak processing labs in New Jersey to be developed as standard "drugstore prints".

When first exhibited at New York City's LIGHT Gallery in late 1972, American Surfaces confounded critics. At the time, art photography was strictly dominated by formal black-and-white archival prints. Shore’s choice to present small, color snapshots attached directly to the gallery walls unframed—using double-sided tape in a strict grid layout—shocked the traditional art world.

Despite unfavorable initial reviews, curator Weston Naef recognized its genius, buying the entire collection and donating it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, the book is celebrated alongside Robert Frank’s The Americans as a cornerstone text of the New Color Photography movement, capturing a sociological snapshot of the American landscape just before commercial homogenization began to erase regional distinctions.

Though the pictures were taken in the early 1970s, the work was not published as a comprehensive book until much later.
• 1999 Edition: A highly abbreviated, 48-page version published by Schirmer/Mosel.
• 2005 Original Phaidon Edition: The definitive version, expanding the sequence to 320 photographs arranged in the exact chronological order they were shot, styled like a photo-diary.
• 2020 Revised & Expanded Edition: Released by Phaidon, this version features updated color-corrections, new scans, and 40 previously unpublished photographs dug out from Shore's archives, bringing the seminal work into the modern age of visual diaries like Instagram.

First edition. Oblong softcover. 48 pages. Exhibition catalog for a show that ran July 16 through September 5, 1999 at Die Photographische Sammlung and then October 23 through December 5, 1999 at Fotografie Forum International in Frankfurt. Includes 77 color images by Shore taken in 1972. A near fine copy in wrappers with a slight bit of tapping to the bottom right corner. Uncommon. , Munich and Cologne