Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore is an American photographer, at the age of fourteen he contacted MoMA's director of photography asking them if he could come and show them his work. And so his career began and by the age of seventeen he was already a huge part of New Yorks conceptual and pop art scenes and he ended up crossing paths with Andy Warhol. Despite his successes he had never experienced much of the world and so in 1972 he set out with a friend to Amarillo, Texas. Later that year he went off again alone with the desire to capture and communicate exactly what he had seen. He wanted to explore the country as an everyday tourist so he used a 35mm colour film and a camera that is now deemed as a "point and shoot" camera. He titled the project "American Surfaces" to emphasise the superficial nature of the things he captured, he relentlessly photographed almost every meal he ate, every person he met, every waiter or waitress that served him, every bed he slept in, every toilet he used and streets he drove through.