Uncommon Places: The Complete Works

3. Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary Uncommon Places has influenced more than a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take colour beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format colour work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past forty years.
Uncommon Places: The Complete Works presents a definitive collection of the landmark series, and in the span of a decade has become a contemporary classic. Now, for this lushly produced reissue, the artist has added twenty more images and a statement discussing the rediscovery of photographs never previously printed and what it means to expand a classic series.
Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a unarticulated vision of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore retains precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light, through which a parking lot emptied of people, a hotel bedroom, or a building on a side street assumes both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance.