Based on Clément Chéroux’s idea, this book and the accompanying exhibition look at Stephen Shore’s work through the unexplored lens of vehicular photography. Most of his images produced since the 60’s was taken from a car, a train, a plane or even, recently, a drone. The journey, as important as the destination, becomes a pretext for experimenting and developing a unique body of work. Stephen Shore explores vernacular contemporary landscapes and what they reveal about American society.
The book features some ten series in chronological order. In 1969, Stephen Shore documented Los Angeles from a car, choosing to shoot snapshots in B&W, leaving room for chance and mistakes. He pursued this conceptual approach by delving into the visual language of postcards, producing a series on the city of Amarillo in 1971, followed by his two most important series, American Surfaces and Uncommon Places, which established him as one of the pioneers of color photography.
American Surfaces is a travel diary composed of snapshots of day-to-day life, complemented by a scrapbook gathering all collected items from his travels: receipts, motel flyers, etc.
Also featured is the Topographies series, produced in 2020-2021, in which he experiments with a drone-mounted camera: “The documentary dimension of his images is always very important to him (explains Clément Chéroux). He doesn’t want to photograph vertically, not to go too far towards abstraction. He pays close attention to the position of the horizon and the height of his camera, which is not that of a passenger or airliner. As he had done with the car, he explores the landscape in its typically American character. For him, the vehicular is a way of questioning the vernacular.
These different series are punctuated by extracts from a long interview conducted in 2023 between Stephen Shore and Clément Chéroux. Two texts signed by each introduce the visual corpus, looking back at the photographic road trip as a genre in its own right in the history of photography, from Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Man Ray and Robert Frank to Joel Meyerowitz. Clément Chéroux also examines the reasons why these artists use the car as a creative tool, which places them in a state of “visual hyperacuity” where images appear organically within the frame of the windshield.
22 x 27 cm
150 colour photographies
Texts in French
