Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places

Sprüth Magers' dedicated Stephen Shore exhibition constitutes the acclaimed photographer's first solo show in Berlin for 15 years. 

The collection features 80 previously unseen works from the series Uncommon Places - the second major body of work that followed the series taken during his first major road trip in 1972 that became known as American Surfaces - as well as a number of pages from his seminal Road Trip Journal, kept as an impassive record of day to day life during the expedition. 

Prodigious from a young age - the fourteen-year-old Shore famously sold some of his photographs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he was already mixing with Andy Warhol's Factory set by his late teens - the self-taught photographer went on to become one of colour photography's most prominent pioneers. 

The body of work that became known as Uncommon Places was the result of his second major exploration of America in 1973. Whereas for American Surfaces the images are deliberately fleeting - snapshots of the people, places and objects he encountered on the 1972 road trip - those in Uncommon Places focus on the minutiae of modern life in America: anonymous intersections, generic motel rooms and monotonous gas stations.

To create these more considered images Shore shot using colour film and a tripod-bound, larger format, 8 x 10 inch view camera, a combination that had rarely been used to record America's social landscape before, but which required the user to make more premeditated decisions when composing a photograph. 

By assembling this large group of previously unpublished works in a single exhibition the curators provide the viewer with a chance to gain a deeper sense of the artist's movements, and the specific place he has defined.

Works from Uncommon Places and American Surfaces are currently also on show in Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1968-1993 at the NRW Forum in Düsseldorf, which is also the location for Der Rote Bulli: Stephen Shore and the New Düsseldorf Photography, a con-current exhibition that explores Shore's influence on a generation of young German photographers.