Some gifts shape a destiny. For Stephen Shore, it was a Kodak developing kit, complete with a simple instruction leaflet, given to him for his sixth birthday in 1953. His uncle Leo, an engineer in the U.S. Navy, had sensed a spark in the young boy. “He thought I’d like photographic chemistry,” the photographer recalls. “He was right.”
The boy immediately transformed his bathroom into a darkroom. Self-taught, he developed his parents’ snapshots by hand. It didn’t matter that the fixer stained his nails black or that his fingertips cracked from the chemicals. Stephen persevered. “It was as though this gift uncovered something that was buried in me. My life in photography began.”
Two years later, he received a 35 mm camera. And for his tenth birthday, a neighbor gave him a now-legendary book: American Photographs by Walker Evans, the father of documentary photography. “I can’t imagine a better gift at that time.” says Shore. He took from Evans an essential lesson: “a camera doesn’t point at the world but frames it.”
Stephen studied obsessively: Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank. He endlessly experimented with film (Kodak, Adox, Agfa), developers (D-76, Microdol-X, Rodinal), and different types of paper. “I learned to develop by inspection: looking for a second or two at the developing film under a very dark green safelight, to judge time of development.”
Technique became “second nature.” So did black-and-white photography, which he mastered with astonishing ease, even though today he is celebrated as one of the pioneers of color photography. “I learned the characteristics of each new lens I used, its angle of view, its rendering of space, its depth of field.”
New York in black and white
The America Stephen grew up in was still emerging from the shadows of war. “The faces of the adults in my early photographs seem more deeply etched by life than the faces I see today on Manhattan streets,” he observes. His father had come of age during the Great Depression. The Holocaust still loomed over his Jewish family. Trauma hung in the air.
Stephen, meanwhile, pursued his obsession. On a sunny day, the teenager photographed his parents at a street corner in Rhinebeck, New York. The image shows them standing still at a crosswalk, staring into the lens amid a jungle of signs for cigars, ice cream, and department stores, while cars blur past in the background — a scene at once symbolic and intimate, a snapshot of 1960s America.
To fund his equipment, the young photographer devised a clever scheme. He headed to playgrounds near Sutton Place, an affluent Manhattan neighborhood, where he photographed children with their nannies, collected their home addresses, and then showed up at their parents’ doors with an 8×10 print. He charged five dollars. “This is worth more than $50 in today’s money,” he marvels in retrospect. “No one ever turned me down.”
In his hometown, which he photographed from every angle, he sought out the faces of elegant women. He roamed Washington Square Park, capturing the chess players and the eclectic crowds strolling around the fountain or shooting from the windows of a passing bus. In 1964, he even invented a technique: photographing urban life by holding his Leica with a 21 mm wide-angle lens above his head.
On one bench, he captured a young couple with a casual air sitting next to a classically dressed mother pushing a stroller. “I seemed sensitive to cultural “types.”” he notes. His images possess a startling maturity. Sometimes the film would accidentally capture his own reflection in a café window — a youthful silhouette, yet already playing in the big leagues. His formal confidence and eye for detail were astonishing.
From MoMA to the Factory
Lee Lockwood, photojournalist and editor-in-chief of Contemporary Photographer, took him under his wing. “Here’s where I saw Lee Friedlander’s photographs for the first time, as well as the work of Don Donaghy, Duane Michals, Bruce Davidson, and Dave Heath, who became a friend.” Heath introduced Shore to W. Eugene Smith, the legendary Life magazine photojournalist.
Shore bought his first photographic print from Smith: Guardia Civil, showing three policemen against a light background that makes the darkness of their eyes stand out. It cost $35. “I remember asking him the price. He replied, “$35”. I was shocked. “$35 for a photograph?!” Gene said, “OK, OK, $25.”
Never short on audacity, the young photographer called Edward Steichen, director of the MoMA photography department, directly in 1962. “I showed him some of the images that are in this book,” Shore recalls. “I can’t really account for this boldness. It may simply have been naivety, but everyone I approached was welcoming.”
The boldness paid off. At just fourteen, Shore sold three prints to Steichen for the MoMA collection in New York. Seventy-two years later, Early Work, published by Mack, exhumes the forgotten archives of his youth, predating his first published works taken at Andy Warhol’s Factory, which became his refuge. Shore left school to pursue photography full time.
His family was “devastated” but eventually accepted it. It’s what I did instead of going to college,” he says of this new chapter. “Everyone there was in some way an outsider to straight society. Most were gay (I was not), but ALL were outsiders. Difference was not simply tolerated in the world of the Factory, it was celebrated. I felt understood there.”
“It’s my character”
This immersion at the Factory instilled in him “the taste for aesthetic thinking,” the foundation of the conceptual explorations to come: American Surfaces, Uncommon Places. But Early Work stops at the threshold of that future career. The book ends with photographs from the set of Andy Warhol’s film Restaurant and the party that followed. These were the images from the day Stephen first walked through the Factory doors. The day he became Stephen Shore.
“Editing the photographs, I’ve been aware of how little recollection I have of making them,” Shore admits today. As if the images had been created by someone else. Technique, history, framing, gaze, emotion. It was all there, instinctively. Ask him how he got there, and he’ll tell you it was destiny. “I can’t help it,” says the scorpion in Orson Welles’ cult film Mr. Arkadin. “It’s my character.”
Early Work by Stephen Shore is published by Mack Books and available for $70.
