Teenage clicks: how child photographer Stephen Shore turned everyday New York moments into magic

"Black-and-white street shots of elegant, unimpressed elderly women. Classic cars in shadows cast by New York's soaring tenement buildings. Street-corner preachers. Imposing wiseguys too busy posturing to notice the camera. Stephen Shore's new book, Early Work, is full of such everyday New York moments turned into magic. Though he later won acclaim for the photographs he took at Andy Warhol's studio/hangout the Factory, the previously unseen Early Work may be some of Shore's most uninhibited and daring pictures and they were taken in the early 60s, when he was a teenager."

"The memory of the prints I made then is hard to separate from the memory of the actual event of taking the photograph, he admits over the phone. I don't remember what was on my mind then, but what I see looking at them now is a kind of formal awareness, which I guess I understood intuitively. I understood from the beginning that a camera doesn't point, it frames. I also understood the gap between the world of the photograph and the world we experience the world of the photograph has to make sense on its own, out of context."

"He does remember how he took a series of shots from an unusual high angle, a kind of giant's eye view of passersby as if the voracious young photographer were trying to grasp his home city from every possible perspective, to make himself big enough to understand it. I put a very wide-angle lens on my Leica and held the camera over my head and took pictures randomly. People were out on the street experiencing each other not scrolling through TikTok"

Stephen Shore's Early Work presents black-and-white street photographs of everyday New York scenes captured when Shore was a teenager in the early 1960s. The images include elderly women, classic cars, street-corner preachers and imposing wiseguys, rendered with emerging formal awareness and confident framing. Shore printed many of the photos himself in a DIY darkroom in his parents' Manhattan bathroom. Some images were shot from unusual high angles using a wide-angle Leica held aloft, producing bold perspectives that emphasize the photograph's autonomy and visual logic independent of context.

Read at www.theguardian.com