When he titled his new book “Early Work,” Stephen Shore wasn’t exaggerating. He made these photographs between the ages of 12 and 17. All are remarkably precocious, and many are flat-out remarkable. Last month, in the sunny dining room in his house in upstate New York, near Bard College, where he has been the director of the photography program since 1982, Shore flipped through the book, analyzing images as if he were assessing the output of another artist — which, in a way, he was. In most cases, he had no recollection of taking the picture.
Shore, 77, is renowned for elegantly composed color photographs made with a view camera, often of prosaic scenes that he encountered on road trips across America. They seem a world apart from these black-and-white pictures, almost all previously unpublished, that he snapped between 1960 and 1965 with a hand-held 35 millimeter camera.
Over the years, his studio manager urged him to take a look at his youthful efforts. When she finally printed a stack of photographs for him, he was astonished. “I thought they were amazing,” he said. “It puts me in this awkward position of talking about my work in the third person and saying it’s amazing.”
Shore’s youthful photographs, mainly of New York City street scenes, predate his earliest published pictures, which he took at Andy Warhol’s Factory. He chose to end this collection with a sampling of shots he made in his first day at the Factory in 1965, having been invited to photograph there by Warhol, whom he met through the filmmaker Jonas Mekas.
“That was the lead-in to the next phase of my life,” Shore said. “Different subject matter, and it was a very different circumstance. Rather than roaming the streets and photographing strangers, I was photographing friends who all liked to be photographed.”
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post Stephen Shore Started Taking Photos at 8 Years Old and Never Stopped appeared first on New York Times.
