A Monograph Issue on Stephen Shore's Conceptual Colour Photography
Hotshoe Issue 214 is devoted entirely to Stephen Shore, structured as a monograph issue examining his practice across conceptual colour photography, diaristic seeing, and the road-trip work that defined much of his output in the 1970s. The issue brings together a conversation with Todd Hido, texts by Shore himself, and an essay by Tom Cornelius — positioning the editorial around Shore's sustained and methodical engagement with colour as a primary pictorial language.
The Todd Hido conversation provides a sustained dialogue between two photographers whose approaches to colour and American space share certain affinities, while remaining formally distinct. Shore's own texts offer direct access to his thinking, unmediated by critical apparatus. Tom Cornelius's essay situates Shore's practice within the broader field of conceptual colour photography, drawing on the arc of work from American Surfaces through Uncommon Places.
The issue's editorial angle is precise: it treats Shore not as a historical figure to be commemorated but as a working intelligence whose decisions about colour, framing, and subject matter remain analytically productive. The New Topographics context — the 1975–1976 exhibition in which Shore's work appeared alongside that of other photographers renegotiating landscape and the built environment — is part of the critical frame without being the whole of it.
At 191 pages, the issue runs at the longer end of Hotshoe's format, allowing the editorial to develop Shore's practice with some depth rather than reducing it to a portfolio survey.
About Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore (born 1947) is an American photographer closely associated with the introduction of colour into art photography and a direct, diaristic approach to image-making. His road-trip work from the 1970s produced two of the most discussed bodies of work in the medium: American Surfaces, a serial record of motels, diners, and everyday encounters, and Uncommon Places, a more formally composed examination of the American landscape and built environment.
Shore received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975 and was included in the New Topographics exhibition (1975–1976), which gathered photographers working with a cooler, more analytical relationship to landscape. In 1976, the Museum of Modern Art presented a solo exhibition of his colour work. In 2010, he received an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society.
