Stephen Shore - Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography

‘Shore’s work has been a personal inspiration from my earliest interaction with it. With Modern Instances, I am humbled to have his profound insight into the rigorous over-thinking that made it possible. This insight, delivered with such clarity, grace, and humility, will no doubt affect how you make or appreciate photographs – it might even alter how you see.’ - David Fincher

‘Shore’s memoir is as riveting as it is illuminating – an almost deceptively seamless narrative of experiences, associations, correspondences, images, and remarkable erudition that testify to the mind’s eye through which, from the beginning of his career, Shore has transformed the seemingly spontaneous configurations of his photography into profound works of art.’ - Jane Kramer

‘Modern Instances is like a conversation among friends. It reveals a deeply inquiring mind, and renders making photographs, and looking at them, one of the most exciting and humane of pursuits.’ - Sandra Phillips

‘Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life.’ - Giorgio de Chirico

Stephen Shore’s Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography is an experimental new memoir from one of the world’s most prolific artists — an impressionistic scrapbook that documents the rich and surprising touchstones that make up over half a century of ground-breaking work. With essays, photographs, stories, and excerpts that draw on Shore’s decades of teaching, this is an essential handbook for anyone interested in learning more about mastering one’s craft and the distinct threads that come together to inform a creative voice. As much as offering meditation on the influences of a single artist, Modern Instances proposes a new way of thinking about the world around us, in which even the smallest moment can become a source of boundless inspiration — if only we pay attention.

Silkscreen printed linen hardcover
17 x 24.5cm, 224 pages
ISBN 978-1-913620-53-0
February 2022

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