Stephen Shore Revisits His Early New York Photographs

Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

“I remember none of it!” Stephen Shore says, sounding a little incredulous. “I mean, there are a couple of pictures that I remember taking, but it’s almost like an out-of-body experience.” He’s talking about the images that appear in his new book, Early Work, which contains photographs he made between 1960 and 1965. 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 Most went unpublished at the time, although he got a couple into a magazine called U.S. Camera (which eventually evolved into Travel + Leisure), and when he was 14, MoMA bought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. Only recently did his studio manager, Laura Steele, start scanning the negatives and telling Shore, “You should look at these.” Some, he was extremely surprised to find, were made at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, in Atlantic City. “I have a couple of rolls of film on the floor, so I had to have had a floor pass. I photographed Bobby Kennedy standing on the hood of a car at a rally outside.” He has no memory of making the trip.

With a few exceptions, they don’t look a lot like the photographs that thrust Shore into prominence in the 1970s. 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.) Those famous images have something in common with collage in that they are precise assemblages of lines and shapes, but instead of than putting them together on a surface, he’s framing and capturing them from life. By contrast, the early work in the new book is black-and-white, shot with handheld cameras. Most of it depicts scenes in and around New York, often with people in the frame. There are quite a few pictures shot on the Upper East Side, where Shore lived with his parents, and in Greenwich Village.

It’s easy, when looking at this body of work, to make facile comparisons to the great street photographers who were working in New York City at the same time — Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand — but Shore says he wasn’t looking at their work, not yet. He first learned of Levitt, he says, after her book A Way of Seeing was published in 1965. “There weren’t exhibitions the way there are now, and there weren’t very many books published.” Barely any galleries cared about photography, either. The biggest influence of the time was perhaps Robert Frank’s The Americans — “of course I knew that,” Shore says — and he’d spent some time with the work of W. Eugene Smith, Lee Friedlander, Weegee. (The resonances with Winogrand and Arbus are probably an accident of time and place, because we’re seeing the same era’s low-slung cars and skinny ties and such, and they’d surely all been looking at Frank’s book.)

There is one particular photograph in this set that looks a bit more like his later work, and it’s on the back cover of the new book (and appears just below). It shows a street corner in Rhinebeck, near where Shore lives in Dutchess County, and how it resurfaced is almost uncanny. A couple of years ago, he says, “I went to Rhinebeck with my wife to do some shopping and came home. And Laura had printed a stack of these pictures for me to see, and the one on top was a picture of my parents standing on the corner in the center of Rhinebeck, an intersection I’d just driven through 15 minutes before, ten miles from my home.”

Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

Shore is a renowned teacher who has, since 1982, been head of the photography department at Bard College. So I asked him to look at a dozen of these pictures with two thoughts in mind: to recall what little he does remember about making them and also consider them as he would the work of an incoming student. He was perhaps a little reticent about that second idea — my hunch is that he was averse to discussing his younger self as some sort of prodigy, although he’d certainly be within his rights to do so — but he warmed to the idea, and his observations, excerpted below, were illuminating and thoughtful. At the end, I asked him for a more general crit of his younger self, and here’s what he said: “My goal in teaching is to help each person find their own voice — not imposing mine on them but trying to uncover theirs. Sometimes it is giving actual guidance, and sometimes you have to let people alone — you feel like they’re on track and they just need a little nudging. And I would say that this is a person that seems on track. He has an awareness of the frame, and he may not have been conscious of this; it may just have been good instinct. So I’d make him conscious of his awareness of the frame, pointing out in those pictures where he’s carefully chosen the vantage point, understanding how three-dimensional spaces collapse onto a picture. And pointing out that this young man seems intuitively aware that the reality of a photograph is not the same as the reality of the world.”

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Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

This looks like the Upper East Side. Yes — it’s on Sutton Place. I grew up in a building that’s on the left side of the picture. And you got up close to this woman, which seems like a bold thing for a young person to do. Part of that was no one I can recall ever had a reaction to it. No one said, “Go away.” Of all the pictures, this is the only one where someone reacted to having their picture taken. It would not be true now. It could have been because I was just some kid, you know, and there just weren’t as many photographers.

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Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

That’s true of this one — they’re not reacting. Yes. One thing I see in the work in general was that I was very aware of facial expressions, looking for moments that seem meaningful or revelatory. And that structural sense, an awareness of the frame and how the frame works. But I want to go beyond that: Another thing I see is a kind of understanding of the gap between the world and the world in a photograph. They’re not the same thing, and stopping a moment with particular expressions creates this particular experience that’s not the same as sitting on the bus watching them.

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Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

That’s an unusual composition. One thing I think about when I’m looking at this picture is my decision to include so much of the building. That’s what makes the picture for me — it’s not just the beauty of these women and their kind of self-possession, but the way I’m balancing them with the rest of the frame.

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Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

These guys seem like they’re in a New York that doesn’t exist anymore. I sometimes hear people who grew up in an ethnic neighborhood in Queens say that they’d fight with each other but then go and play stickball together. And I see this kind of interaction in those guys hanging out outside the candy store or luncheonette or whatever. But the other thing is that people hung out on the street more. They didn’t watch television the same way, and this was a half a century before or more before the first smartphone. People hung out on the street and they interacted. There was less to do. Or they were happy doing it.

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Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

This woman, on the other hand, meets your gaze. Is she dismayed to be photographed or did you just catch a momentary expression, I wonder? I don’t know. But there are a number of people who are looking at me as I’m looking at them. When I was 14, I took a class with Lisette Model, and I don’t remember what the content of her critique of my work was, but I see in some of the pictures of mine at the time her kind of confrontational, critical boldness.

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Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

The first picture of these two reminds me slightly of the ones in Uncommon Places that you became widely known for. So this is a picture I assume I’m taking from a bus, because that’s how I got to school. There are a couple that you actually see the bus window in, but there are a number of them in the book where, if you see any of a street with a kind of slightly elevated view, they’re taken out of a bus window. And I’m looking at the kind of street theater. And then here’s one on the subway — did you shoot much there? I did not, but there’s another one taken on a train, and you know, there’s so many contact sheets covering so many years that I’m sure I missed lots.

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Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

You wouldn’t encounter a scene like this these days in New York, except maybe at Coney Island. One thing I remember is that, over a period of years, I would frequently go to the block on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and that’s where all the pictures of street preachers are taken. But also I’d go photograph people in the arcades, where the pinball machines were, and that’s where this is taken. And I just love him. I mean, he’s just helping his son in the ways of the world, you know? “Dear boy, let me help you fire that gun.” And we can joke about it, but this guy probably fought in World War II and came back alive — he’s that age.

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Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

From your essay in the book, I know you went to the Hackley School, up in Tarrytown, and I see a Hackley sweatshirt here, so I guess that’s where it was? Yes. So there are three pictures from Hackley in the book, all from 1960. It’s a private school in Westchester, and some kid has gotten a switchblade and is showing it off. Was your Hackley experience good? No, but not because of Hackley. I was just too young, and was homesick all the time. But I feel indebted to William Dexter, whose apartment with his wife was at the end of my hall. He was very encouraging of my photography, and there was a darkroom there. It was my first time working in a darkroom that wasn’t a converted bathroom.

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Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

That’s at Bleecker and MacDougal Streets. I notice that you can see yourself in the reflection — is that one reason you chose this picture? That’s part of it. And I knew the area — at this point I was living on the Upper East Side and going to school on the Upper West Side, but for several years, I went to Little Red Schoolhouse and would wander around the Village a lot. I once thought that the height of sophistication was to sit in Cafe Borgia and drink espresso. In high school I was, a couple of times a week, going to the Bleecker Street Cinema. After school, or sometimes when I should have been in school.

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Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

This looks like the waterfront, or maybe onboard a ship? Yes, exactly. That’s on the Staten Island Ferry. And it’s another one where you got up close to some strangers. The other thing I see in this picture is that I’m taking in the whole frame. It’s really the same kind of formal awareness of how space and lines are rendered in a picture that I continue to explore later. It’s one of my favorite pictures from the time — I don’t remember taking it, but I printed it a number of times at the time, and that’s one of the ones I knew about before Laura brought the collection to my attention. You caught the guy’s ear at the right-hand edge just right. Yeah.

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Photo: Stephen Shore, from Early Work (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

I’m not sure where this was. Maybe Washington Square. It could be, because that was one of the standard places I would go. I mean, I wasn’t just living my life and having a camera along — I would go do things just for the sake of taking pictures, going on the ferry, going to 42nd Street. And Washington Square Park was another one. I don’t mean to compare it in any way, but it was taken probably the same year as Garry Winogrand’s bench photograph — which is a picture I have had hanging in my house for more than 50 years, and is one of my very favorite photographs. Isn’t it incredible? I could stare at it for an unlimited amount of time. It just keeps revealing itself. It is just an amazing piece of work. I don’t mean to be promoting myself, but in my memoir, Modern Instances, there’s an essay called “A Thousand Words” that is — oh God, I literally wrote exactly 1,000 words about that photograph. The editor came back and wanted to make a couple of cuts. And I said, “Well, if you’re gonna cut these three words out, you’d better add three somewhere else.”

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