{"id":190854,"date":"2025-09-01T05:11:25","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T05:11:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/190854\/"},"modified":"2025-09-01T05:11:25","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T05:11:25","slug":"teenage-clicks-how-child-photographer-stephen-shore-turned-everyday-new-york-moments-into-magic-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/190854\/","title":{"rendered":"Teenage clicks: how child photographer Stephen Shore turned everyday New York moments into magic | Photography"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black-and-white street shots of elegant, unimpressed elderly women. Classic cars in shadows cast by New York\u2019s soaring tenement buildings. Street-corner preachers. Imposing wiseguys too busy posturing to notice the camera. Stephen Shore\u2019s new book, Early Work<\/a>, is full of such everyday New York moments turned into magic. Though he later won acclaim for the photographs he took at Andy Warhol\u2019s studio\/hangout the Factory<\/a>, the previously unseen Early Work may be some of Shore\u2019s most uninhibited and daring pictures \u2013 and they were taken in the early 60s, when he was a teenager.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s understandable, then, that the photographer, now 77, can\u2019t really remember taking them \u2013 though he does recall that he printed them himself, in a DIY darkroom set up in the bathroom of his parents\u2019 home on Manhattan\u2019s Upper East Side. \u201cThe memory of the prints I made then is hard to separate from the memory of the actual event of taking the photograph,\u201d he admits over the phone. \u201cI don\u2019t remember what was on my mind then, but what I see looking at them now is a kind of formal awareness, which I guess I understood intuitively. I understood from the beginning that a camera doesn\u2019t point, it frames. I also understood the gap between the world of the photograph and the world we experience \u2013 the world of the photograph has to make sense on its own, out of context.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018I see a photographer observing the people and the city\u2019 \u2026 Stephen Shore, from Early Work. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Mack<\/p>\n

He does remember how he took a series of shots from an unusual high angle, a kind of giant\u2019s eye view of passersby \u2013 as if the voracious young photographer were trying to grasp his home city from every possible perspective, to make himself big enough to understand it. \u201cI put a very wide-angle lens on my Leica and held the camera over my head and took pictures randomly.\u201d<\/p>\n

People were out on the street experiencing each other \u2013 not scrolling through TikTok<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The idea for Early Work came after Shore returned from Rhinebeck Village in upstate New York, whereupon his studio manager Laura Steele presented him with a stack of prints made from his archive. The picture on top depicted Shore\u2019s parents standing on a street corner \u2013 in Rhinebeck. Though Shore has lived nearby since the early 1980s, \u201cI had no idea I had been there before.\u201d The picture appears on the back cover of the book and is the one in the collection Shore is most attached to. Aside from sentimental reasons, it prefigures the formal concerns he would explore aged 23, when he travelled across the US with an 8×10 camera, taking the photographs that appear in his lauded book Uncommon Places<\/a>, an expansive portrait of America\u2019s diners, gas stations and national parks.<\/p>\n

\u2018I had no idea I\u2019d been there before\u2019: Stephen Shore\u2019s parents in Rhinebeck. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Mack<\/p>\n

Looking through Early Work, it is remarkable how uninterested Shore seems to be in people his own age. Most of his subjects are over 40. Their generation, he points out, had lived through the Great Depression and the second world war \u2013 many were veterans trying to return to regular life in the city. The pictures suggest a reverence and respect for their authority, though Shore can\u2019t remember whether he was feeling this when he took them. \u201cI see a photographer observing the people and the city, observing their inner state, how they interact, looking at social and cultural meanings,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople who are drawn to the medium of translating the world into an image tend to be fascinated by the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shore\u2019s documentation of 1960s New York<\/a> inevitably reveals how social habits have changed over the decades. \u201cThe city is crowded now, but people don\u2019t hang out in the same way,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople were out on the street experiencing each other, engaging with each other and feeling free to roam the city, not scrolling through TikTok.\u201d The pictures also convey a sense of liberation perhaps less accessible to New York kids today. \u201cParents were not as protective and determining of their children\u2019s activities,\u201d Shore says. \u201cWhen I was eight and living in Manhattan, I went to school downtown alone on two different buses. That was typical in the 1960s.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was Shore\u2019s uncle Leo who introduced him to photography. Recognising his nephew\u2019s nascent interest in chemistry, he gave Shore a Kodak ABC Darkroom Outfit as a sixth birthday present \u2013 a simple kit for making contact prints at home, complete with developing trays and chemicals. By 1962, the 14-year-old Shore had signed up to take photography classes at New York\u2019s New School, where he studied briefly under the great Austrian American photographer Lisette Model<\/a> \u2013 whose influence can be seen in the confrontational approach and bold attitude of some of Shore\u2019s shots of people on the street.<\/p>\n

\u2018Pictures sold for nothing \u2013 if they sold\u2019 \u2026 Stephen Shore, from Early Work. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Mack<\/p>\n

He became involved in a photography community who would get together once a month to critique each other\u2019s work. \u201cYou\u2019d get a little slip of paper in an envelope with a time and date for the meeting,\u201d he remembers. \u201cIt was like a secret society \u2013 except we didn\u2019t have any pretensions to exclusivity.\u201d Photography<\/a> was hardly ever exhibited at museums or galleries at the time: \u201cThere was absolutely no notoriety involved in being a photographer, there was no remuneration, pictures sold for nothing \u2013 if they sold. Some people are drawn to the medium without any possibility of fame or fortune.\u201d<\/p>\n

MoMA was one of the few New York art institutions to take photography seriously enough to have a curator dedicated to it, Edward Steichen<\/a>, and at 14 Shore called him up, which led to MoMA acquiring three of Shore\u2019s photographs. In 1971, Shore became the first living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Met. Despite being awarded two prestigious fellowships in 1975 and a subsequent solo show at MoMA the following year, his pictures sold for as little as $125 each. Shore got by financially thanks to teaching \u2013 he has been the director of the photography department at Bard College, New York, since 1982. \u201cI\u2019ve taught every generation from X to Z.\u201d<\/p>\n

A diner with Shore reflected in the window. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Mack<\/p>\n

Early Work ends with pictures Shore took on his very first day at the Factory. He and Warhol had met at a screening where the latter premiered his underground movie The Life of Juanita Castro and Shore presented a 16mm film, Elevator. He would spend three years photographing the Factory almost daily, capturing \u201csuperstars\u201d such as Edie Sedgwick, its house band the Velvet Underground, and the groundbreaking work its impresario was making. Warhol, Store says, \u201cwas always friendly and direct. He was 20 years my senior and would, if I said something inappropriate in a situation, correct me, somewhat like an older relative giving guidance, but otherwise he treated me as a friend.\u201d As Shore was the only other person in the group who lived on the Upper East Side, \u201cwhen we broke up for the evening, perhaps two in the morning after a late supper in Little Italy or Chinatown, Andy and I would share a taxi uptown. We had totally unguarded conversations.\u201d Many of the Factory regulars were gay, as was Warhol, but \u201che understood that I was straight \u2013 and this was never an issue\u201d.<\/p>\n

While Shore got unprecedented access to the Factory, the pictures he took there lack the expansive experimentation and lucidity of Shore\u2019s street shots. You can sense the photographer, still only a teenager, feeling his way into a new world. In his 20s, Shore would become one of the defining photographers of postwar America, but Early Work shows that his ability to articulate the mood of his country in images was present right from the start. \u201cPainters start with a blank canvas and make marks to add complexity; photography is the opposite \u2013 you start with the whole world,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t know what to do with a blank paper \u2013 but put me on a street corner and my imagination goes off!\u201d<\/p>\n

Stephen Shore: Early Work<\/a> is published by Mack on 1 September, \u00a355<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Black-and-white street shots of elegant, unimpressed elderly women. Classic cars in shadows cast by New York\u2019s soaring tenement…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":190855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-190854","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115127326190675056","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}