Heart of Palm Beach Motel, Palm Beach, Florida, November 8, 1977

Stephen Shore has had a singularly distinctive career, and one that began remarkably early in life. At the age of fourteen, Edward Steichen, then Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased his work, and during his later teenage years, Shore was a regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory, documenting the comings and goings. He had the unique distinction of being the first living photographer after Alfred Stieglitz, some 40 years earlier, to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His two most influential projects—American Surfaces and Uncommon Places, both from the 1970s—are, at their heart, epic photographic studies of middle America, and stand in the long tradition of the American road trip. While crisscrossing the country Shore made hundreds of color negatives—either with a 35mm handheld Rollei, or an 8x10 inch view camera—that document the consumer driven ordinariness of society. Included in the important New Topographics exhibition in 1976, Shore’s work reverberated with artists like Bernd & Hilla Becher and Martin Parr, who in turn introduced his work to a new generation of students. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, will launch a major retrospective of Shore’s work in the Fall of 2017.