Beginning to See the Light

Rowland Bagnall dives into the early work of Stephen Shore, newly collected by MACK.

By Rowland BagnallDecember 13, 2025

• Art & Architecture

THE TEMPTATION, when encountering the juvenilia of certain artists, is to look for signs that point toward the work to come, to find a common thread or link that proves where they are heading, mapping the teleology of their careers: Jane Austen’s notebooks, boyhood sketches by Picasso, the earliest recordings of Bob Dylan or the Quarrymen. The same is true of Stephen Shore, who, along with Ernst Haas, Garry Winogrand, and William Eggleston, helped redefine the boundaries of American photography. With this summer’s publication of Early Work, a selection of Shore’s black-and-white photography of New York in the 1960s, we observe his earliest experiments, a period of precocious self-determination that sets his career in motion.

Since the publication of Uncommon Places (1982), Shore has been synonymous with color. Produced using an 8 x 10 large-format camera mounted on a tripod, the series captures the vastness, beauty, and mundanity of the American landscape, documenting Shore’s extensive travels through the country in the early 1970s, “a sort of unfinished atlas,” as the Italian photographer Guido Guidi called it. Marked by their stillness, patient compositions, and a strange sense of detachment, the pictures in Uncommon Places have become a standard of American color photography. “His work is Nabokovian,” reflected Tennessee Williams, “exposing so much, and yet leaving so much room for your imagination to roam and do what it will.”

Shore’s reputation as a pioneering color photographer was cemented with American Surfaces (1999). Published 27 years after they were taken, these photographs record a restless period of 22 months on the road, capturing the landscapes, in-between spaces, and small towns of the United States. Snapped with a 35 mm Rollei camera and commercially developed (Shore returned his finished rolls of film to Kodak via a local camera store), the project is expansive, sprawling, and all-encompassing, reminiscent of the epic scope of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), the poet’s great attempt to sing the vast extent of the United States—“America’s busy, teeming, intricate whirl,” he writes in “Eidólons.” From motels and diners to storefronts and eccentric strangers, Shore’s photographs cohere into a portrait not just of the US but also of the photographer himself, invisible behind the camera. He explained to Lynne Tillman in 2004: “I started photographing everyone I met, every meal, every toilet, every bed I slept in, the streets I walked on, the towns I visited. […] I was recording my life.”

Shore’s color work has influenced American photography for 40 years, and since 1982, he has served as the director of the prestigious photography program at Bard College. As he put it in a recent interview, he has “taught every generation from X to Z.” His influence is all the more remarkable when one remembers that the photographs in both American Surfaces and Uncommon Places were taken when he was in his twenties, emerging somehow fully formed.

Shore’s maturity as a photographer is frequently accounted for by way of Andy Warhol. In 1965, aged 17, Shore began to spend time at the Factory—Warhol’s New York studio and a hangout for artists, musicians, and bohemians—arriving almost every day for three years to take pictures. “It’s what I did instead of going to college,” Shore writes in a brief autobiographical essay in Early Work. “I learned a lot from watching Andy, an artist in the midst of his creative process, repeatedly making aesthetic decisions.” The Factory photographs were later published in The Velvet Years 1965–67: Warhol’s Factory (1995), serving as a kind of preface to Shore’s canonical color work. They depict Warhol and his coterie at work and play, from Edie Sedgwick and John Lyons to the members of the Velvet Underground. One picture shows Warhol sitting calmly as a woman points a bright revolver at his head, an eerie premonition of his shooting at the hands of Valerie Solanas, just a few years later.

“I rejected my Factory period for a long time,” Shore said in a 2007 interview for Wallpaper* magazine. “For so many of the others involved, it was the pinnacle of their lives. For me it just wasn’t. It was the beginning.” As Early Work reveals, however, “the beginning” predates Shore’s time at the Factory entirely, stretching back to a rigorous self-taught apprenticeship of his childhood and teenage years.

Born in New York in 1947, Shore was introduced to photography when he was six. An only child, he was given a Kodak ABC Darkroom set for his birthday and quickly learned to develop the family snapshots. Four years later, a neighbor gifted him a copy of Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938). It “was the first photography book I ever looked at,” he told Alec Soth in a 2019 interview. “I lucked out.” His luck continued when his parents transferred him to a Hudson Valley boarding school, where he encountered William Dexter, an influential teacher and avid photographer who allowed Shore to make use of his private darkroom. Early Work includes a wonderful portrait of Dexter photographing the school soccer team; facing away from us, he points a finger to the sky, a signal to the students to ready themselves. Showing early signs of Shore’s eye for compositional balance, the picture also comments on the medium of photography: we see Shore’s shadow falling forward from behind the lens, a reminder—along with Dexter’s camera in the middle of the picture—of the constructed nature of the photograph.

Shore claims not to remember taking many of the photographs in Early Work, allowing him to see them “more as an observer […] than as their author.” Produced from 1960 to 1965—when he was between the ages of 13 and 18—the photographs, in one sense, serve as a documentary record of New York, continuing the work of several notable photographers, from William Klein and Helen Levitt to the tabloid flashgun Weegee, each of whom had photographed Manhattan in the previous decades. Shore was clearly interested in people, producing a number of brilliant portraits, snapping subjects unawares, mid-thought, mid-step, mid-conversation, at times catching “a particular glaze that comes over the eyes of New Yorkers when they walk through the streets,” to borrow a line from Paul Auster’s Moon Palace (1989), “a natural and perhaps necessary form of indifference to others.”

Shore has a knack for picking people from the crowd, singling out individuals with beautiful, expressive faces, whether a trio of young nuns in spotless wimples or a man sporting immaculately Brylcreemed hair, adjusting his tie in a music shop window. One photograph depicts an older woman in a summer dress and sunglasses, smoking in a chair outside the entrance to her building, the floor tiles quickly swallowed by a darkly shaded zone behind her, the contrast drawing out her silver hair, the slope of her shoulders, subtle wrinkles around her mouth, and the fabric of her handbag. Early Work gives the impression that New York is a city composed entirely of striking faces, that a prerequisite for living there is that you must be interesting to photograph.

Unsurprisingly, given Shore’s age, a number of the pictures here betray inexperience, whether blurriness or clumsy framing, even awkward compositions, details slightly out of place. More than anything, however, Early Work reveals a sense of experimentation, Shore deliberately working out the rules of his new medium. Two photographs capture a slice of sunlight breaking through a gap between tenement buildings, allowing Shore to play with the intensity of light and dark. Other pictures indicate his interest in windows, testing out the possibilities of frames within the frame. Shore seems especially interested in exploring the limits of a given photograph, in stress-testing how much visual information it can hold before it collapses into chaos. This is true of several exposures making bold use of reflections, as well as an apparently uninteresting picture of a backyard and a line of laundry, in which Shore seems to be working out the distribution of competing forms. “During these years,” he writes, “I developed a technical fluency”: “I learned to see in black and white. The result of these years of experimentation was that I didn’t have to think about technique. It became second nature; it was already assimilated.”

Occasionally, Shore hits gold, producing beautifully weighted pictures, well beyond his years. A photograph of children sitting on the steps of an imposing building strikes a clever balance between straight-edged architectural lines and the children’s flowing, windswept hair, the creases of their winter coats. Shore’s obvious ability did not go unnoticed. In 1962, he telephoned the Museum of Modern Art to see if he could meet with Edward Steichen, the director of photography: “I showed him some of the same pictures that are in this book. He bought three for the museum."

From time to time, Shore’s pictures seem to prefigure the work to come. His photo of a New York Esso gas station nods ahead to Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975 from Uncommon Places, while a snapshot of his parents on a street corner in Rhinebeck, New York, appears to pre-echo a street scene in Saskatchewan made 10 years later. As Daisy Hildyard puts it in her novel Hunters in the Snow (2013), “the present always comes before the past; the past is laid over the present and looked through, like a pane of glass.”

The pictures also bear the influence of previous practitioners, particularly Walker Evans, whom Shore has cited as a guide at several points through his career: “I see a harmony, a kinship, between his sensibility and mine.” One of Shore’s photographs depicts a typical convenience store, taken squarely from the front, adorned with the same kind of lettering and signage that appears in many photographs by Evans. Elsewhere, Early Work includes a picture of an old man in a lab coat standing at the entrance to his commercial photography studio, which seems to consciously acknowledge Evans’s shot of a photographic studio in New York in the 1930s.

Ultimately, what is strange about Shore’s Early Work is how historical it feels. Given his position in the canon as a color pioneer, it is odd, even a touch disorienting, to find him standing with a foot so firmly planted in the past. It is not simply that these photographs are black-and-white (which Shore would return to in the 1980s) but also that the world depicted seems so distant. Shore’s photographs in Uncommon Places and American Surfaces, while they bear the hallmarks of the 1970s, still seem, all these decades later, like snapshots from the world as it appears today. By comparison, the images in Early Work are photographs of history; it is not that Shore’s subjects have come to seem old-fashioned over time so much as they appear to have been somehow historical already—at the time of being photographed.

This may have something to do with the spectral echoes from the history of photography that surface in Shore’s pictures. At times, it seems as though the teenage Shore is carrying them forward, unintentionally. The accordion player in one shot, for example, hearkens back to a photograph by André Kertész, taken in New York just a few years earlier, in 1959—the same André Kertész who, born in the 19th century, photographed the trenches in the First World War. The pictures in Shore’s previous book, Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape (2023), were taken with a high-tech drone; that the photographs in Early Work are made by the same person seems almost unbelievable. It’s a depiction of New York City that, at times, seems closer to the work of Alfred Stieglitz, whose famous photograph Winter - Fifth Avenue (1893) features a horse and cart. Shore seems conscious of this fact himself: “The faces of the adults in my early photographs seem more deeply etched by life than the faces I see today on Manhattan streets […] A forty-year-old then would have grown up during the Great Depression.”

In a telling moment, ruminating on how the photographs in Early Work came into existence, Shore writes that “there have been times when philosophers have suggested that we bring a great deal with us to our lives.” He then quotes Cicero: “It is […] strong proof of men knowing most things before birth, that when mere children they grasp innumerable facts with such speed as to show that they are not then taking them in for the first time, but remembering and recalling them.”

Throughout the photographs in Early Work, it is as though Shore had a sense, already, of the way things should be pictured, somehow carrying the history of American photography with him, innately imprinted. “[T]here is, I am beginning to suspect, a strange rule in photography,” writes Geoff Dyer in The Ongoing Moment (2005), “namely that we never see the last of anyone or anything. They disappear or die and then, years later, they reappear, are reincarnated, in another lens.”

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