Vancouver Art Museum announces major donation of Stephen Shore photography

The Vancouver Art Gallery announced this week that it has received a gift of more than 800 works from the series “Unusual Places” by American photographer Stephen Shore. The donation comes from the Vancouver Chan family, a long-time supporter of the museum.

Filmed on a road trip across North America between 1973 and 1981, “Unusual Places” was originally published in book form and is considered a landmark in the history of contemporary photography. The series consisted of color photographs of everyday places and objects and, along with the work of William Eggleston and others, helped establish the legitimacy of color in fine art photography. The series was widely exhibited at the time and also had an impact on young photographers such as Andreas Gursky, who was exposed to Shore’s work while at school.

When Shore began creating color works in the 1970s, he already had an extraordinary career. At the age of six, he received a darkroom set from a relative; at the age of 14, the Museum of Modern Art purchased three of his paintings. Between 1965 and 1967, when he was a teenager, he photographed scenes at Andy Warhol’s Factory, where he noticed Warhol’s fascination with the banal. In 1971, at the age of 23, his black-and-white photography earned him a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

That same year, Shore exhibited a series of folk photographs at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York, including crime scene records, publicity photos of movie stars, and his own snapshots of friends. In 1972, he adopted the aesthetics of such images in American Surfaces, a series of undistorted flash photographs of diners, rest stops, and motel rooms he encountered during his travels across the United States. In 1973, the photographs were taken with a 35mm camera and displayed as a 3 x 5-inch grid in the Light Gallery.

Unusual Places builds on American Surface, replacing the apparent casualness of the earlier series with a more formal approach, while adhering to the same commonplace themes. The photographs of Unusual Places, taken this time with a large-format camera, have a greater depth of field, making them flatter and more schematic. This is especially true of the series’ street and highway images, which do not recede into the frame but appear to be locked into the geometry of the picture, revealing Shore’s status as a master of painterly composition.

“We are deeply grateful to the Chan family for their generosity and their commitment to making Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places accessible to all,” said Eva Respini, interim co-CEO and contributing curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, in a press release. “Few works have changed the course of photography so decisively.”

In March, the Vancouver Art Gallery will celebrate the donation with the exhibition “Stephen Shore: Unusual Places,” which will feature approximately 50 photographs drawn from the donation. Below are seven images from Unusual Places, a gift from the Chen family.