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Stephen Shore: American Surfaces | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen Shore
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $55.00
Buy New: $34.65
You Save: $20.35 (37%)
New (8) Collectible (4) from $34.65
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 267435
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 232
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.8
Dimensions (in): 12.1 x 8.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 0714845078
Dewey Decimal Number: 779.092
EAN: 9780714845074
ASIN: 0714845078
Publication Date: May 1, 2005
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 1 to 3 weeks
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Product Description
In 1972, Stephen Shore left New York City and set out with a friend to Amarillo, Texas. He didnt drive, so his first view of America was framed by the passengers window frame. He was taken aback by the fact that his experience of life as a New Yorker had very little in common with the character and aspirations of Middle America. Later that year he set out again, this time on his own, with a drivers licence and a Rollei 35 a point-and-shoot camera to explore the country through the eyes of an everyday tourist. The project was entitled American Surfaces referring to the superficial nature of his brief encounters with places and people and the underlying character of the images that he hoped to produce. With such an easy-to-use camera, he photographed relentlessly. In American Surfaces, I was photographing almost every meal I ate, every person I met, every waiter or waitress who served me, every bed I slept in, every toilet I peed in. But also, I was photographing streets I was driving through, buildings I would see. Shore returned to New York triumphant, with hundreds of rolls of film spilling from his bags. In order to remain faithful to the conceptual foundations of the project, he followed the lead of most tourists of the time and sent his film to be developed and printed in Kodaks labs in New Jersey. The result was hundreds and hundreds of exquisitely composed colour pictures, whose subject became the benchmark for documenting of our fast-living, consumer-orientated world a body of work that followed on from Walker Evans and Robert Franks experiences of crossing America and that influenced reams of photographers such as Martin Parr and Bernd & Hilla Becher, who introduced a generation of students to Shores work.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Excellent, beautiful book! July 25, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book looks great and has an incredible collection of photographs printed at actual size. Really nice addition to my library.
Helping us See Again...Beyond Critiques of American Consumer Fetishism September 27, 2006
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I loved this book, partly because I love this photographer's eye. Are the pictures documentary? Sure. Are they wry? Often, though not always. They are beautiful in the most strange, farfetched, formal aesthetic sense (shapes, colors, imaginary visual lines). That about sums it up. Stephan Shore's pictures exist on many levels simultaneously---one reason they are worth owning in book form, able to be revisited many times over a long time. Shore has a genuine gift, and he shares it with whomever takes the time to really look. This older work is relevant to contemporary production worldwide (i.e., Thomas Struth). Hopefully you will enjoy this book as much as I do.
 American Surfaces, pretentious time capsule? February 25, 2006
16 out of 34 found this review helpful
It's hard to tell how vital this visual diary is in the grand scheme of photography. It's a very personal travelogue. Shore is obsessed with himself and where he goes and what he sees. As a summary of early seventies pop culture it is fantastic. You can find out what people looked like and more importantly, what everything else looked like. I appreciate this aspect of the book, it's a reference guide to 1972. I think some of the photography is top notch but think that the book would be stronger edited down a bit. It's more interesting than the original but packs less of a punch. Could you live without it? Of course. Do you want to? No.
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