Stephen Shore Color Uncommon Places

Stephen Shore Uncommon Places

Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places (1982) is one of the defining photographic books of the 20th century, establishing the visual and intellectual grammar of the New Color Photography movement. Where earlier art photography had treated color as decoration or commercial compromise, Shore demonstrated that color could carry the full philosophical weight of a serious artistic practice.

The Making of Uncommon Places

Shore began the extended road trip project in 1973, driving a series of American routes and stopping to photograph the vernacular landscape - motels, diners, parking lots, suburban intersections, and roadside views - with 8x10 large-format view cameras. The project concluded in the early 1980s and was published as Uncommon Places in 1982 by Aperture.

The choice of 8x10 was deliberate and radical. Large-format photography required a tripod, a dark cloth, and methodical composition on the ground glass - the opposite of the spontaneous 35mm street photography that had dominated postwar photography discourse. Shore's images have the quality of pure seeing: there is no expressive camera shake, no dramatic timing, no flattering light. The camera sits level, the horizon is respected, and the ordinary subject is treated with the same compositional rigor reserved for grand landscapes.

Color as Information

Shore's palette reads as documentary rather than expressive. He worked largely in midday and mid-afternoon light - the conditions most photographers avoid - which produced flat, even illumination that let color function as pure information. The turquoise of a motel swimming pool, the orange vinyl of a diner booth, the brown of a McDonald's uniform exist as facts rather than aesthetic choices. This 'democratic' relationship to color directly influenced William Eggleston, who had been developing parallel ideas simultaneously.

Influence on American Visual Culture

Shore was among the first artists given a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1971, when he was 23), an unusual event for a living photographer. Uncommon Places anticipates the visual vocabulary of New Topographics photography, the deadpan American commercial photography of the 1990s and 2000s, and the Instagram aesthetic of flat midday light and vernacular subject matter. Photographers including Alec Soth and Todd Hido have cited Shore as foundational.

A second expanded edition of Uncommon Places was published in 2004, adding images from the later period of the project.