Stephen Shore was something of a child prodigy. He sold his first photograph to New York's Museum of Modern Art at age 14. At 23, he became the first living photographer to have a solo exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Schooled in Andy Warhol's Factory during his teenage years in the 1960s, Shore became interested in pop culture, the aesthetic qualities of amateur photography, and the concept of serial images. At the time, "serious" photography was done in black and white; color was for advertising and fashion.

Much in photography has changed since then, and quite a bit is due to Shore's influence. He has headed the photography department at Bard College since 1982 and his 1998 book, The Nature of Photography (reprinted this year by Phaidon) is widely read by students of photography. Last year Aperture Foundation produced the exhibition Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1969-1979 in conjunction with the republication of Shore's seminal 1982 book, Uncommon Places. The show will close at New York's International Center of Photography on September 9, then open at the Amarillo Museum of Art in Texas on November 1. The exhibition, together with the two books, offer an exhilarating view of this pioneering photographer's work and processes.

Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California, August 13, 1979 by Stephen Shore. From the exhibition Biographical Landscape and book Uncommon Places (Aperture Foundation, 2004).

Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore hit the road to photograph the American scene, and in the process, he revealed something of the national character as described in local identities and the landscape. During the weeks and months of travel, he says, the Top 40 radio format became so tedious that he began to recite Shakespeare to relieve the boredom. At the preview of this exhibition at ICP, he quoted a line from Hamlet. The actor's purpose in playing, said Hamlet, is "to show the very age in which we live, and the body of the time, its form and pressure; to delineate exactly the manners of the age and the particular humor of the day."

The quote characterizes what Shore has done, which is to make photographs that seem extremely casual to the point of artlessness, but actually delineate the way in which the scene photographed actually is. On looking at these pictures, you can tell what time of year and day it is; the approximate temperature and barometric pressure; the social and economic ethos of the small towns in which they were shot; and a lot more besides.

On his first trip, in 1973, Shore stayed over in places that most recreational travelers would consider pit stops. In scene after scene of small towns and their fringes, vernacular buildings, power lines, and gas station signs form an architectural setting that the photographer manipulates - by shifting his 8 x 10 camera one way or another - to create precisely framed, highly structured images. These pictures of ordinary places share the kind of formality found in images made by the great 19th-century "view" photographers, such as Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson.

The dusty parking lots, intersections, cheap motels and local diners depicted are more often populated by cars than people. Shore has said that to describe a place with utmost clarity, more than once he has driven his own car into a scene to get the composition the way he wanted it and to provide a marker of the year. In the several portraits on view, the people seem more like artifacts than personalities, here to demonstrate the styles in jeans and eyeglasses favored by 20-somethings during the 1970s.

In addition to the more than 160 photographs, digitally printed especially for the exhibition, are items Shore collected in his travels. The postcards, journal pages, mug shots lifted from a police station, and receipts for cash outlays form a subtext for this visual biography that is anything but nostalgic. One of the highlights of the ICP installation is a selection of Shore's recent limited edition iPhoto books; these were added by ICP and are not part of the traveling exhibition.

Most of the books center on a specific theme that Shore photographed during a single day. One exception is a book he made by dissecting what might be his best-known image, shot at the Merced River in Yosemite National Park (above). Against a heroic mountain backdrop, with the Half Dome visible in the distance, a family has stopped to enjoy the river. Shore exposed the image at the exact moment when a mother photographs her child taking a dip and six foreground figures form a triangular arrangement along the water's edge. For the iPhoto book, Shore cropped sections out of the original picture to create a book of serial photographs, each one believable as a single, intentionally created image.

Exhibition itinerary:

Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, TX: November 1, 2007 - January 6, 2008
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO: February 22, 2008 - May 18, 2008.

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