Stephen Shore's latest book, "Early Work," reveals a collection of extraordinary street photographs that capture the essence of 1960s New York City - all taken when the now-renowned photographer was just a teenager. The black-and-white images feature elegant elderly women walking city streets, classic automobiles casting shadows beneath towering tenement buildings, passionate street-corner preachers, and intimidating wise guys too absorbed in their posturing to notice the young photographer's camera.
These previously unseen photographs, taken in the early 1960s, may represent some of Shore's most uninhibited and daring work, predating even his acclaimed documentation of Andy Warhol's Factory. Now 77, Shore admits he can barely remember taking these shots, though he vividly recalls developing and printing them himself in a makeshift darkroom he set up in his parents' bathroom on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
"The memory of the prints I made then is hard to separate from the memory of the actual event of taking the photograph," Shore explains over the phone. "I don't remember what was on my mind then, but what I see looking at them now is a kind of formal awareness, which I guess I understood intuitively. I understood from the beginning that a camera doesn't point, it frames. I also understood the gap between the world of the photograph and the world we experience - the world of the photograph has to make sense on its own, out of context."
Among the most striking images in the collection are shots taken from an unusually high angle, creating a giant's eye view of passersby below. Shore achieved this perspective by mounting a very wide-angle lens on his Leica camera, holding it over his head, and taking pictures randomly. This technique reflected the voracious young photographer's attempt to grasp his home city from every possible angle, as if trying to make himself large enough to truly understand New York's complexity.
The idea for "Early Work" emerged when Shore returned from a trip to Rhinebeck Village in upstate New York. His studio manager, Laura Steele, presented him with a stack of prints from his archive, with the top image showing Shore's parents standing on a street corner in Rhinebeck. Despite living nearby since the early 1980s, Shore had no memory of ever photographing there before. This particular image, which appears on the book's back cover, holds special significance for Shore and foreshadows the formal concerns he would later explore at age 23 during his cross-country journey with an 8x10 camera for his celebrated book "Uncommon Places."
What's remarkable about "Early Work" is Shore's apparent lack of interest in photographing people his own age. Most of his subjects are over 40, representing a generation that had lived through the Great Depression and World War II. Many were veterans attempting to readjust to regular civilian life in the city. The photographs suggest a deep reverence and respect for their authority and experience, though Shore cannot recall whether he consciously felt this way while taking the pictures.
"I see a photographer observing the people and the city, observing their inner state, how they interact, looking at social and cultural meanings," Shore reflects. "People who are drawn to the medium of translating the world into an image tend to be fascinated by the world."
Shore's documentation of 1960s New York inevitably reveals how dramatically social habits have evolved over the decades. "The city is crowded now, but people don't hang out in the same way," he observes. "People were out on the street experiencing each other, engaging with each other and feeling free to roam the city, not scrolling through TikTok." The photographs also convey a sense of childhood liberation that seems less accessible to New York kids today, as parents in the 1960s were far less protective and controlling of their children's activities.
Shore's introduction to photography came through his uncle Leo, who recognized his nephew's budding interest in chemistry. As a sixth birthday present, Leo gave Shore a Kodak ABC Darkroom Outfit - a simple kit for making contact prints at home, complete with developing trays and chemicals. By 1962, the 14-year-old Shore had enrolled in photography classes at New York's New School, where he studied briefly under the legendary Austrian-American photographer Lisette Model. Her influence is clearly visible in the confrontational approach and bold attitude evident in Shore's street photography.
During this period, Shore became involved with a photography community that met monthly to critique each other's work. "You'd get a little slip of paper in an envelope with a time and date for the meeting," he remembers. "It was like a secret society - except we didn't have any pretensions to exclusivity." Photography was rarely exhibited in museums or galleries at the time, and there was virtually no commercial market for artistic photographs. "There was absolutely no notoriety involved in being a photographer, there was no remuneration, pictures sold for nothing - if they sold," Shore recalls. "Some people are drawn to the medium without any possibility of fame or fortune."
Despite photography's marginal status in the art world, the Museum of Modern Art was one of the few New York institutions to take the medium seriously, employing Edward Steichen as a dedicated photography curator. At just 14 years old, Shore boldly called Steichen directly, which led to MoMA acquiring three of his photographs. In 1971, Shore made history by becoming the first living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even after receiving two prestigious fellowships in 1975 and a solo show at MoMA the following year, his pictures sold for as little as $125 each. Shore supported himself financially through teaching, serving as director of the photography department at Bard College in New York since 1982, where he has "taught every generation from X to Z."
"Early Work" concludes with photographs Shore took on his very first day at Andy Warhol's Factory. He and Warhol had met at a screening where Warhol premiered his underground film "The Life of Juanita Castro" and Shore presented his own 16mm film, "Elevator." Shore would spend three years photographing the Factory almost daily, capturing superstars like Edie Sedgwick, the house band Velvet Underground, and the groundbreaking artistic work being created there.
Shore describes Warhol as always friendly and direct, noting that "he was 20 years my senior and would, if I said something inappropriate in a situation, correct me, somewhat like an older relative giving guidance, but otherwise he treated me as a friend." Since Shore was the only other person in the group who lived on the Upper East Side, they often shared late-night taxi rides home after evenings in Little Italy or Chinatown, during which they had "totally unguarded conversations." While many Factory regulars were gay, as was Warhol, Shore notes that Warhol understood he was straight "and this was never an issue."
Interestingly, while Shore gained unprecedented access to the Factory, the photographs he took there lack the expansive experimentation and clarity of his street shots. The Factory images reveal a photographer still finding his way in a new environment, feeling his way into an unfamiliar world. Though Shore would go on to become one of the defining photographers of postwar America in his twenties, "Early Work" demonstrates that his ability to capture his country's mood through images was present from the very beginning.
"Painters start with a blank canvas and make marks to add complexity; photography is the opposite - you start with the whole world," Shore explains. "I don't know what to do with a blank paper - but put me on a street corner and my imagination goes off!" Stephen Shore's "Early Work" will be published by Mack on September 1, priced at $55.
