Vancouver Art Museum Announces Major Gift of Stephen Shore Photographs

The Vancouver Art Gallery announced this week that it has received a gift of more than 800 works from American photographer Stephen Shore’s series “Uncommon Places.” The donation comes from the Vancouver-based Chan family, which has long supported the museum.

Taken on road trips across North America between 1973 and 1981 and originally published as a book, “Uncommon Places” is considered a landmark in the history of contemporary photography. The series consists of color pictures of quotidian places and objects that, along with the work of William Eggleston and others, helped establish the legitimacy of color in fine art photography. Widely exhibited at the time, the series was also an influence on younger photographers such as Andreas Gursky, who encountered Shore’s work while in school.

By the time he began making color work in the 1970s, Shore had already had a remarkable career. At age six, he received a darkroom setup from a relative; at age 14, the Museum of Modern Art bought three of his pictures. Between 1965 and 1967, while still a teenager, he photographed the scene at Andy Warhol’s Factory, where he took note of Warhol’s fascination with the banal. In 1971, when he was 23, his black-and-white photography earned him a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

That same year, Shore presented an installation of vernacular photographs—including crime scene documentation, publicity photos of movie stars, and his own snapshots of friends—at Holly Solomon Gallery in New York. In 1972, he adopted the aesthetics of such images for “American Surfaces,” a series of uninflected, flash-lit photos of the diners, rest stops, and motel rooms he encountered on a trip across America. Taken with a 35mm camera, they were displayed as a grid of three-by-five-inch prints at Light Gallery in 1973.

Building on “American Surfaces,” “Uncommon Places” replaced the apparent casualness of the earlier series with a more formal approach, even while adhering to the same ordinary subjects. This time shot with large-format view cameras, the photographs in “Uncommon Places” have a greater depth of field, rendering them flatter and more schematic. This is especially true of the series’ images of streets and highways, which rather than receding into the picture plane seem locked into the pictures’ geometries, revealing Shore as master of painterly composition.

“We are profoundly grateful to the Chan Family for their extraordinary generosity and their commitment to making Stephen Shore’s ‘Uncommon Places’ accessible to all. Few bodies of work have so decisively changed the course of photography,” said Eva Respini, interim co-CEO and curator at large at the Vancouver Art Gallery, in a press release.

In March, the Vancouver Art Gallery will celebrate the donation with “Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places,” a show of some 50 photographs drawn from the gift. Below are seven images from “Uncommon Places” drawn from the Chan Family gift.