Stephen Shore's Unique Spin on Western Landscape Photography
By Chadd Scott on
Yes, they’re landscape photos. Yes, they’re from the West.
Stephen Shore’s images of Montana, however, differ significantly from what is traditionally thought of as “Western landscape photography.” The genre of pictures birthed by Ansel Adams. The kind found in thousands of galleries from San Antonio to Seattle and everywhere in between over the past half century.
Scenic. Grandiose. Nature as cathedral.
Stephen Shore, 'Madison County, Montana, August 1, 2020. 45°36.161521N, 111°34.342823W.' Courtesy the artist and 303 Gallery.
“(My photographs) are completely different from that perspective,” Shore (b. 1947) said. “I consider them landscape, but I consider them landscape that involves human interaction.”
Traditional western landscape photography is devoid of any human imprint. Images carefully composed to remove houses and roads. Shore leans into these frictions between the natural and manmade.
In 2020, at the peak of the pandemic, Shore used a drone-mounted Hasselblad camera to capture a unique vantage point of the Montana landscape he has adored since spending a pair of summers there in the early 1980s.
“It can show transitions into land use,” Shore explained of his decision to incorporate a drone to his photography. “What happens when a river runs through a city? What happens when one neighborhood ends, and another begins? Where an industrial neighborhood ends and residential begins. What happens around train tracks as they go through a city. How vegetation changes around a stream. This is made much more obvious and clear seen from above.”
The resulting series of images, titled “Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape,” shot in Montana (and a handful of other places including New York and North Carolina), present views revealing intersections – collisions – where the natural world meets the impact of human presence. Landscapes used and abused by man, by industry, by development, but resilient and somehow still beautiful – in places – despite it. Grotesque in others because of it.
Shore’s “Topographies” can be seen at Tinworks Art in Bozeman, MT through October 19, 2024. They appear during the 2024 season alongside four other artists inspired by the land of the American West: James Castle, Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), Lucy Raven, and Robbie Wing. Tinworks Art – where art meets the American West – also presents a major new ecological artwork by Agnes Denes expanding upon her iconic Wheatfield—A Confrontation (1982), a wheatfield planted on a landfill in downtown Manhattan, then under the shadows of the World Trade Center towers.
Stephen Shore, 'Meagher County, Montana, July 26, 2020 46°11.409946N, 110°44.018901W.' Courtesy the artist and 303 Gallery
Manhattan to Montana
Shore, a New Yorker, was captivated by Montana’s beauty. The fly-fishing. The summers.
He and his wife purchased a home there in 1980, moving from New York City to Montana in 1982. Shore was one of the most prominent fine art photographers in the world at this point. In 1971, he became the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, forty years earlier.
The Montana residency was short-lived due to his becoming the director of the Photography Program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. He wouldn’t return for decades.
The time away did nothing to diminish his fondness. When Shore was able to start returning regularly again in the 2010s, he remained as captivated as ever.
“I love it. Yes, absolutely,” he said.
What is it about Montana?
“I know a number of people who have this reaction, something about that particular landscape that speaks to them. The space. The combination of prairie and mountain. I can go on about it,” Shore said. “There are four river valleys near Bozeman – two to the east, two to the west – that run all roughly parallel, kind of north south, and each one is a different world. The vegetation is different. The feeling is different. If it were a piece of music, I would say each were in a different key.”
Interestingly, when Shore first visited Montana, he refused to photograph it for roughly two years. He was waiting.
“I didn't think I had interesting perceptions of it,” the former Guggenheim Fellow who was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2017 said. “It was just beautiful, which wasn't enough for a picture. I wanted an actual perception with the picture.”
Shore’s patience seems monkish in an era where everyone carries a camera on them at all times, snapping off spontaneous photos continuously, sometimes hundreds in a single day when visiting big scenery across the West like in Montana.
Shore’s eye for images has taken him around the world. Capturing Andy Warhol’s Factory, Israel and the Ukraine. Anyone who’s been to Montana, though, won’t be surprised it was “Big Sky Country” that most captivated him.
