Stephen Shore, Véhiculaire & Vernaculaire @ Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975

Stephen Shore's current exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson is well-timed as people like me have America, cars, energy, and their relationship to each other on our minds. It's interesting to look at at Shore's best known photographs fifty years later, knowing what we do now about America, photography, and the car as vehicle of freedom, and independence. In America, the car is the enabler of mobility, not only in the obvious ways, but socially, economically, and today, it has become a political issue. Shore's snapshots and prints are nostalgic, showing an era when things were different. In the 1970s, the car was embraced as the carrier of so much promise and prosperity. 

The big Chevrolets, Dodges, Cadillacs in Shore's Uncommon Places series reminded me of my childhood, watching American cop shows on television. The thrill of watching the yank tanks—as we called them in Australia—ride the bumps and potholes in chase scenes around densely populated cities with their bad suspension was what kept kids like me entertained for hours. Watching the body separate from wheels on their axel was a neverending wow factor. These were the icons of what it meant to be American. Big cars, bad cops, and no following rules on the road. 

Stephen Shore, Meagher County, Montana, August 5, 2020

Once I looked past the nostalgia of my childhood, I recognized the isolation, loneliness and desolation of the worlds in Shore's photographs. Whether or not it is the isolation and emptiness of the American soul, I am not sure, but in this age of unexpected animosity and racial discrimination, it's difficult to look at Shore's photographs and see only perfectly composed vacant lots and empty streets. To a contemporary viewer, these spaces conjure up images of all the violence and injustice that has taken place in such streets over the years. But this is not necessarily the point of Shore's works. Rather, they show how the car has taken over the landscape and urbanscape of America as well as its psyche. 

Stephen Shore, 21st and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, PA, 1974

This exhibition emphasized Shore's use of moving vehicles to picture the vernacular of American life. Even though these images are taken from moving cars, trains, and more recently, drones, the worlds they represent are static, empty, like ghost towns, perfectly composed nowheres, rarely with anyone in the streets. He often sees the "uncommon places" from unusual angles, making them curious, pushing us to look at everyday worlds we might otherwise not bother to notice. In Ravena, NY for example, we see highways and train lines caving up the face of the American landscape, dominating the environment. We see the land cleared to make way for vehicles, taking pride of place, ignoring needs other than its own.

Stephen Shore, Ravena, NY, 2021

Beyond carparks filled with cars, the photographs show highways, gas stations, advertising signs, landscapes carved up for cars, towns built to accommodate cars, with parking spaces taking up over half the road, highways like rivers coursing across otherwise empty landscapes. Of course, today, we look at the car differently; it is the cause of the destruction of the environment, the problem for the next generation, the making of billionaires from oil money. Today, we are too well aware that greed for oil to drive our cars and fly in planes has led to the destruction of the global south for its natural resources. Shore doesn't really comment on that side of the automobile culture that booms in the postwar years across America. He is more interested in how the car has been given priority in the construction of space, and its consequent isolation of people. Yes, it is possible to travel from coast to coast, but it also brings about the end of conversation, on trains, on sidewalks, on a walk through nature. Nevertheless, it is a testament to the power and longevity of Shore's photographs that they continue to speak to the most pressing concerns of our times.