In 1993 world renowned photographer Stephen Shore travelled to Luzzara, a comune in the province of Reggio Emilia, Italy, where he photographed the town’s people, streets and squares, in beautifully subtle shades of black and white, just as another American master, Paul Strand had done forty years earlier. Today STANLEY/BARKER revisits Shore’s series with an exquisitely produced limited edition publication, which includes a number of never before seen photographs.
Speaking the series Shore said, “There was no way I could approach Luzzara as though I was not familiar with Strand’s work. At the same time, even though I was going to Luzzara exactly forty years after Strand, I was not interested in producing a re-photographic survey. In a certain way, Strand’s work does not need simple updating, because the kinds of people and farms and landscapes he photographed still exist in very much the same form today. But, they exist side by side with the modern world. A key feature of Italian life, at least to my New World eyes, is the presence of the traditional within the modern. My aim, then, was to produce a companion volume to Strand’s work; to produce a group of pictures, which to the limit of the subjectivity of my vision, supplement Strand’s work.”
Shore is one of the worlds most respected living photographers. His series of exhibitions in New York in the early 1970s sparked new interest in color photography and in the use of the view camera for documentary photography. He was 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, and has had one-man shows at meuseums such as MoMA, Jeu de Paume and most recently C/O Berlin.
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