Stephen Shore (Contemporary Artists) - Softcover

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her fiction includes the novels Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt, and No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. Tillman's art and literary criticism has been published in Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Nest, the Village Voice, The Guardian, Bomb, and The New York Times Book Review. She has written stories for the artists' books and catalogues of a variety of contemporary artists, including Kiki Smith, Juan Munoz, Jessica Stockholder, Barbara Kruger, Roni Horn, and Vik Muniz. Her most recent story collection, This Is Not It, appeared in 2002. Tillman's new novel, American Genius, A Comedy, will be published in October by Soft Skull Press.

This survey of photographer Shore's images juxtaposes some of his precociously early work as part of Andy Warhol's Factory with the now classic color photographs of American life from the '70s and Shore's most recent black-and-white pictures. The book is organized into four sections, each focusing on a different set of images. Art historian Fried's disorganized interview with the artist kicks things off with a selection of images from Shore's two career-making books, Uncommon Places and American Surfaces. Critic Lange's wordy overview of Shore's artistic progression examines images from the same periods as the books. Photographer Sternfeld contributes an in-depth analysis of one photograph, taken in 1974, of a street in a small town in Massachusetts. The book closes with images selected by Shore himself, alongside his own writing and extracts from texts that he admires, including a paragraph about Chinese poets, who accept the world exactly as they find it in all its terms, and with profound simplicity therein find sufficient solace. It's a shame that Shore's section isn't longer, as that line perhaps explains his exceptional body of work more completely than any of the learned musings that precede it. (June)
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