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American Surfaces.
Photographs by Stephen Shore.
Phaidon,
London,
2005.
224 pp.,
300 color illustrations,
8¼x9½".
After the Factory and on the cusp of his view camera peregrinations,
Stephen Shore snapped hundreds of pictures
while motoring across the American land in 1972 and 1973.
Shot with a Rollei, these pictures dryly capture the ordinary
moments and things of small-town milieu on the
open road, and that poetic terminus, the motel. In this
sense American Surfaces is a practice run for the more
intensive series of trips he would soon after take to create
the large-format pictures that would comprise Uncommon
Places. The photographs are reproduced as they were first
exhibited in 1972, at standard 35 mm print size, with a mesmerizing
density. The concern of Americana itself—an
investigation of how the national vernacular succumbs to
an accelerating anonymity—is always present, right where
the pictures purport to remain, on the surface. But taken
just as a travelogue or a kaleidoscopic portrait of American
identity in transition would ignore the discipline the pictures
pursue. Almost all of them rigorously follow the
Shore program, seizing similar vantages of small-scale
architecture, shop windows, fridges, flashbulb-sudden portraits,
scummy toilets, diner food, televisions, kitsch paintings,
and the occasional odd detail. And for all their regulation,
they are also disarmingly hilarious. It’s hard not to
laugh at their poker faces, even as they interrogate the
notion of stereotypical images and all that. The quavering
between the academic exploration of loss of identity and
the impulse to restrain cracking up is the mode for the new
era he helped usher in. - ALAN RAPP
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