In Artforum’s May 2003 issue, Stephen Shore unveiled a portfolio of six never-before-published photographs from the 1970s that would later be collected in the book “Uncommon Places: The Complete Works” (Aperture, 2004). Introducing these works, artist and writer Walead Beshty contextualized Shore’s employment of the large-plate view camera with his nineteenth-century forebears William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan, who used the same instrument to document the American West as a sort of uninhabited sublime. “Shore’s use is in part homage,” Beshty noted, “but an homage complicated.” The “wild west” of the 1970s, after all, was one crowded with urban sprawl and the detritus of car culture—a markedly different American Dream from that which might have been conjured a century prior.
 
This summer, the Fondation Cartier-Bresson is putting on the first retrospective of Stephen Shore’s work in Paris in nineteen years. The exhibition takes an extensive look at Shore’s oeuvre, including a number of works from his seminal vehicular photography from the 1970s, of which the “Uncommon Places” series is the most representative.
—The editors