American photographer Stephen Shore holds retrospective in Beijing
2024-09-23
American photographer Stephen Shore talks about his work at the opening of
The Enduring Present: A Retrospective of Stephen Shore, at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, on Sept 14, 2024. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
American photographer Stephen Shore, 77, is celebrated as a photography prodigy and a master of the mundane.
At the age of 14, his photos went into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At only 23, Shore became the second living photographer (after Alfred Stieglitz) to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
In his two iconic series, American Surfaces and Uncommon Places, he documented everyday Americana of the early 1970s on his cross-country road trips, including people he encountered in his journey, parking lots, motel rooms, meals atop tables, and vast and empty roadways.
Those series, credited for pioneering the use of color in art photography and influencing a subsequent generation of photographers worldwide, are on view at The Enduring Present: A Retrospective of Stephen Shore, at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing.
Bringing together a total of 327 photographs from more than 60 years of Shore's artistic career, the show also features Elements, a series consisting of natural landscapes, black-and-white images of archeology and color images taken abroad of people and their daily lives, and Topographies, a new series that the artist captured of the natural, social and cultural landscapes in the United States with a DJI drone made in China.
Shore's seemingly simple but rigorously composed images, made in a state of "heightened awareness," require the viewer to stop and gaze to appreciate their structure, depth, illusion, surprise and even humor, as well as their cultural and social content under the surfaces, according to Jiang Rong, the show's curator.
Curator Jiang Rong gives a guided tour for
The Enduring Present: A Retrospective of Stephen Shore, at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, on Sept 14, 2024. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
Shore's China retrospective debuted amidst widespread attention at the 2023 Lishui Photography Festival in East China's Zhejiang Province, and has since travelled to Shanghai, and Dalian in Northeast China's Liaoning province. The Beijing show, running through until Dec 1, marks the exhibition's last leg.
If you go:
10 am-6 pm, closed on Mondays. Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, 155 A Caochangdi, Chaoyang district, Beijing. 010-6432-2663
