Stephen Shore: Véhiculaire & Vernaculaire

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.

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.