U.S 1, College Park, Maryland, 1/21/76

Notes

Stephen Shore is a prominent forerunner of American photography, widely credited with redefining the visual language of the everyday. Known for his quiet, contemplative images of unremarkable objects, vernacular architecture, and roadside landscapes, Shore helped legitimise colour photography as a serious artistic medium at a time when it was still largely dismissed in the fine art world. His acute attention to composition, clarity, and chromatic nuance transforms the ordinary into something enduring and reflective.

In the 1970s, Shore undertook a series of extensive road trips across North America that would come to define his most iconic body of work. Beginning in 1972 with what became known as the Amarillo trip, a drive from New York to Texas, he documented meals, motel rooms, signage, and streetscapes using a 35mm Leica camera and colour film. These early photographs were later published in American Surfaces. By 1973, he had shifted to using a 4×5, and eventually an 8×10 view camera, seeking greater detail and compositional control. Over the next several years, Shore travelled thousands of miles through states including California, Texas, Florida, Utah, and Montana, as well as parts of Canada, allowing curiosity and the logic of the American road to dictate his movements. The result was Uncommon Places, a landmark body of work grounded in observation, form, and stillness.

The present lot, U.S. 1, College Park, Maryland, 1/21/76 is a quintessential photograph from this period. The image captures a banal roadside scene along U.S Route 1, an arterial highway steeped in postwar American commercial culture, with striking formal precision. A service station, fast-food signs, and a wide expanse of concrete and sky evoke both the visual language of American commercial sprawl and a certain quiet melancholy. Like much of Shore’s work from this period, it offers a democratic view of the American landscape, one that resists spectacle in favour of subtle observation.

Since 1982, Shore has served as director of the Photography Program at Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. His work has been exhibited and collected internationally, with major holdings at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Literature

Stephen Shore (2004) Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, New York: Aperture, another example from the edition illustrated in colour on page 131.