The New Yorker on Stephen Shore’s “Precocious Adolescent Eye”

“To call Stephen Shore the most precocious photographer in the history of the medium is almost correct,” writes Chris Wiley for the New Yorker. Reviewing Early Work, the newly released book by Stephen Shore, director of the Photography Program and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts, Wiley remarks on the photographs in this new collection, which represent a period of Shore’s work from 1960–65. “Shore seems to have barrelled into his adolescence as a fully formed artist,” Wiley writes. While the photos in Early Work bear more resemblance to the work of photographers like Garry Winograd, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, or Robert Frank than Shore’s most famous works would come to, he was very clearly developing his own aesthetic, Wiley argues. “Shore was not simply aping the styles of his predecessors; he was hard at work cutting his own path.”

Post Date: 09-17-2025