Stephen Shore

Uncommon Places is Shore's influential color photography series from American road trips in the 1970s. It includes motel rooms, intersections, meals, gas stations, and everyday places photographed with careful large-format clarity.

In the 1970s, serious art photography was still often associated with black and white. Shore, along with figures such as William Eggleston, helped make color photographs of ordinary American life central to museum photography.

Shore moved from 35mm work to large-format view cameras for much of Uncommon Places. The larger negatives helped him capture the precise detail and stillness of streets, parking lots, signs, and interiors.

Shore's deadpan attention to roadsides, built landscapes, and ordinary American environments overlaps with the concerns of New Topographics photographers. The 1975 New Topographics exhibition helped frame a cooler, less romantic way of photographing human-altered landscapes.