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What Shores?
American colour photography of the 1970s onwards seems to have been rediscovered in the UK in recent years. Rediscovered, that is, by a nod of acknowledgement, then moving on. I refer to the half-arsed Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, set up to encourage new talent, but which habitually shortlists veterans such as Stephen Shore, and then presents the award to someone else. American Surfaces contains Shore's most famous body of work, a New Yorker's document of the aspirations of Middle America, made in the early 1970s, beginning with a drive across the US to Amarillo, in 1972. During that first trip he was a car passenger, but later in the year he set off again, this time on his own, taking with him a Rollei 35, an early compact-style 35mm camera. He returned to New York laden with cassettes of exposed film and took them for processing at the local Kodak laboratory. American Surfaces comes packed in a facsimile Kodak processing envelope, just as Shore's prints were returned to him. The images are reproduced chronologically, in state-by-state sections, captioned only with the name of the town in which they were taken. It is said that the work follows in the tradition of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, which may be true from the documentary angle, but the prime significance is in Shore's use of colour. Colour is integral to every single frame in this book: whether it is a record of the mundane motel rooms Shore stayed in, the unappetising meal he was about to consume, or the grubby toilet pan he prevaricated over... the houses, billboards or unidentified folk he encountered along the way. Dodgy haircuts, consumer signage, beds overdue for new sheets, gas-guzzlers and over-stuffed refrigerators.... The whole is a record of a particular era in modern American history that provides insight into the America of today, a record that is unlikely ever to be surpassed. If you have ever wondered what makes 'American colour photography' an identifiable genre, then just a glance through these pages will make everything crystal clear.
American Surfaces: Photographs by Stephen Shore, published by Phaidon, £35, ISBN 0-7148-4507-8.
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