“Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979” is extraordinary [...] it is hard to state how significant this is [...] the release of "Transparencies" provides us with a fascinating insight into the making of one of American photography’s most iconic works by one of photography’s most important practitioners." – The Washington Post
"Stephen Shore's 1970s experiments with a small-format camera [...] will seem both familiar and fresh to fans of his work" – The Wall Street Journal Magazine
"[Transparencies"] is intriguing, not least because the America that emerges from it seems quintessentially Stephen Shore and yet somehow different: the style less formal, the tone more intimate and spontaneous. [...] There is, too, a distinct aura that emanates from these pictures, a sense of another America, recognisable but distant, that seems at times luminous in its very everydayness" – The Observer
Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979 offers an alternative account of one of the most fabled episodes in photographic history: the cross-country journeys that produced Stephen Shore’s luminous new vision of the American landscape, Uncommon Places. Along with his large-format camera, Shore also brought a 35mm Leica on his travels. The images made with it, on luminous colour slide film, are intimate, spontaneous and personal, while retaining Shore’s studied formal sensitivity. In these entirely unseen photographs, a parallel iteration of an iconic vision emerges like a piece of music played in a new key.
The vocabulary is familiar: highways and homes, phone boxes, fast food and sun-strewn parking lots. But the alternative format unmistakably re-envisions these subjects through distinct experiments with composition, attitude, and colour. Transparencies uncovers both a detail-oriented survey of the American landscape of the 1970s and a rigorous, imaginative exercise in form by an undisputed modern master.
With an afterword by Britt Salvesen, curator at LACMA, titled 'Ordinary Speech: The Vernacular in Stephen Shore’s Early 35mm Photography'.
Read an extract from Salvesen's essay on our blog here.
Large-format embossed hardback with tipped-in image
30 x 31 cm, 192 pages
ISBN 978-1-912339-70-9
March 2020
