“Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1969–79”

Stephen Shore, Trail’s End Restaurant,
Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973

©Stephen Shore Courtesy Apeture Foundation

For anyone who grew up in the 1970s, the photographs of Stephen Shore’s “Uncommon Places” series conjure childhood as forcefully as Proust’s madeleine. More than 60 color prints—taken with a large-format camera on road trips across the United States and Canada between 1973 and 1978—form the bulk of ICP’s exhibition, along with a smattering of earlier and later works. As a teenage shutterbug in the 1960s, Shore documented Warhol’s Factory, and “Uncommon Places” depicts the most commonplace bits of Americana beloved by the Pop artists—highways, motel rooms, diner breakfasts, questionable home decor—transporting us back 30 years into a past that seems slightly unreal because of its perfect acuity.

A few of Shore’s images capture fleeting moments that play with the visual clichés of pictorial transcendence. A rainbow appears over the tanker truck at the Horseshoe Bend Motel in Lovell, Wyoming. A billboard picturing a majestic snow-covered peak stands on U.S. 97, south of Klamath Falls, Oregon, in the midst of a much less distinguished landscape of browned weeds and distant hills, while a momentary cloud formation gives it the revelatory rays of a religious painting. Yet the best—like the rusting green Plymouth Valiant parked on the side of a street of ramshackle wooden houses in Natural Bridge, New York, or the stopped traffic at a Mazda dealership on Speedway Boulevard in Tucson, Arizona—bathe absolutely mundane scenes in a gorgeous, limpid atmosphere that endows these slices of the once-real with uncommon grace.