A recent (June 2002) Art in America interview with the great German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher yielded this gem. "It was obvious that color had to come. We had acquired a small series in color by Stephen Shore--bought or exchanged--and the photographs hung there [in the Dusseldorf Academy of Art], for all our visitors to see. That had a certain influence." Regardless of whether or not there is a causal relationship between Shore's "small series in color" and the work of the Dusseldorf Academy students, the fact is these images are imbued with a "heroic articulation of the real." This superb new monograph contains unpublished work from Shore's original ground-breaking body of work, Uncommon Places. Shore is one of photography's greatest thinkers to boot and 50 Unpublished Photographs is sprinkled with passages from his The Nature of Photographs, a seminal text which illuminates the relationships between the photograph as an object, its content, its purely visual qualities, and the experience of viewing it. This refreshing combination of images and words makes 50 Unpublished Photographs one of the most important books of the year.
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