STEPHEN SHORE: Véhiculaire & Vernaculaire

Initiated by Clément Chéroux, this book and exhibition presented at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, examine Stephen Shore's work through the unexplored prism of vehicular photography. Since the 1960s, Shore has made most of his images from a means of locomotion, be it car, train, plane or even, more recently, drone. The journey, as important as the destination, becomes a pretext for experimenting and constructing a singular photographic work. In this way, Stephen Shore explores the vernacular of the contemporary landscape, and what it reveals about American society itself.

The book presents a dozen series in chronological order, from his B&W work in Los Angeles, when he was just 21, to his two major series American Surfaces and Uncommon Places, as well as the more recent Topographies, conceived in 2020-2021, with a camera mounted on a drone. These series are punctuated by excerpts from a long interview between Stephen Shore and Clément Chéroux. Each of them wrote a text on the subject of the photographic road trip, considered a genre in its own right in the history of photography, from Jacques Henri Lartigue to Man Ray, Robert Frank and Joel Meyerowitz.

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