Stephen Shore: American Surfaces

Stephen Shore, American Surfaces: Queens, New York, April 1972

from a review of Shore's 2014 show, posted on Esse 
"...Shore has the unique ability to document vernacular subjects with the formal casualness of a vacation snapshot but in a way that invests them with a kind of existential monumentality. In other words, he makes the overlooked details of everyday life important, plucking them from their place in space and time with the click of a well-placed shutter. Seen together, his photographs of American roadsides from the 1970s look as contemporary as his images of modern day Abu Dhabi. Scale is often the only giveaway about “when” we are seeing in Shore’s photographs. Keeping the size of the original images, the show lets the older snapshots brush up (sometimes quite literally) against the artist’s more recent large-scale prints..."