Black-and-white street shots of elegant, unimpressed elderly women. Classic cars in shadows cast by New York’s soaring tenement buildings. Street-corner preachers. Imposing wiseguys too busy posturing to notice the camera. Stephen Shore’s new book, Early Work, is full of such everyday New York moments turned into magic. Though he later won acclaim for the photographs he took at Andy Warhol’s studio/hangout the Factory, the previously unseen Early Work may be some of Shore’s most uninhibited and daring pictures – and they were taken in the early 60s, when he was a teenager.
Perhaps it’s understandable, then, that the photographer, now 77, can’t really remember taking them – though he does recall that he printed them himself, in a DIY darkroom set up in the bathroom of his parents’ home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “The memory of the prints I made then is hard to separate from the memory of the actual event of taking the photograph,” he admits over the phone. “I don’t remember what was on my mind then, but what I see looking at them now is a kind of formal awareness, which I guess I understood intuitively. I understood from the beginning that a camera doesn’t point, it frames. I also understood the gap between the world of the photograph and the world we experience – the world of the photograph has to make sense on its own, out of context.”
