Stephen Shore, London Exhibition

SOMETHING + NOTHING, curated by Todd Levin

26/11/13 – 11/01/14

@ Sprüth Magers, London.

The exhibition is an interesting take on Shore’s images. Exploring the similarities of Shore’s work from his American Surfaces and Uncommon Places period and showing them alongside work created more recently in Abu Dhabi, Israel and the Ukraine. It seems that he can leave America and still create Stephen Shore images of a cross road and spaces in other places.

The exhibition has small old prints hung alongside the new work in various groupings on the gallery wall.

“The artist’s recent works in both digital and film, illustrate a continued interest in documenting the social landscape.” from the press release. It is great to see a photographer who is still learning new techniques and applying them to his approach to photography.

“The exhibition … approaches Shore’s oeuvre taxonomically; the images organised categorically rather than chronologically, by subject matter rather than series. Works from the artist’s early and recent series are removed from their original groupings and arranged side by side” This attribute of the exhibition, I liked this as it let me see Shore’s work in new ways and see ideas that I had not seen in his work before.

In Shore’s books Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places, which some of these images come from and when reading this book in the past I have not seen these themes so clearly before. Shore is also the author of The Nature of Photographs, which is a good primer on what makes a photograph work as an image. It is refreshing when a gallery exhibition leads you to new discoveries in the work of a photographer and for that I thank the curator Todd Levin.

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Quotes are from the press release supplied by the gallery. All images © Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Installation views: Stephen White.

I have now included in the slideshow gallery installation images that show part of what I am referring to in this post.