American Surfaces: Revised & Expanded Edition

The most consequential American photographs of the 1970s look like nobody bothered to compose them. A pancake breakfast shot straight down. A motel bed. A stranger's face lit flat by a flash, centered, unposed, given no more ceremony than the gas station sign three pictures later. Stephen Shore drove across the country in 1972 and 1973 and photographed whatever was in front of him with the deliberate carelessness of a man keeping a diary in Kodacolor.

Take the meals. Shore photographed nearly everything he ate, plates framed dead center under diner light, and the effect is stranger than it sounds. Each one is a small still life of American abundance and monotony at once, the same eggs and pancakes recurring like a refrain across state lines. The pictures decline to tell you whether to find them funny, sad, or simply true.

The people are the surprise. Between the meals and the storefronts, Shore kept photographing the faces of those he met along the way, waitresses, clerks, strangers encountered for an hour and never again, each one centered and flash-lit with the same even regard he gave a parking lot. The portraits are neither flattering nor unkind. They record that this person existed here, on this day, in this light, which turns the whole cross-country run into a ledger of ordinary encounters.

The trip produced hundreds of these, made on a small camera and printed cheaply at the drugstore, then pinned to a gallery wall in a grid in 1972 as if the snapshot had wandered into the museum by mistake. Alongside William Eggleston's work of the same moment, the project helped drag color photography out of the commercial ghetto and into serious art. What had looked like everyone's vacation film suddenly carried the weight of a document.

Color is doing quiet work throughout. This is drugstore color, slightly off, greens tilting warm and skies going a little flat, the exact palette of amateur prints from the era. Shore did not correct it toward beauty. He let the vernacular look stand, so the pictures carry the texture of the moment they were made instead of the polish of the moment they entered the museum.

The technique is a kind of anti-technique, held with real discipline. Frontal, evenly lit, centered, printed small, sequenced in the exact order the pictures were taken so the book runs like a travel log instead of a curated argument. Nothing is off limits. A toilet, a television, a half-eaten meal, and a human face all receive the same level attention, which is the quiet radical premise underneath the casual surface.

That flattening of hierarchy is the legacy. By granting a urinal and a portrait equal standing, Shore proposed that the entire visible world was available, that seeing well mattered more than choosing important subjects. The diaristic habit he modeled here, the compulsion to photograph the meal and the motel and the passing face, arrived decades before every pocket held a camera that does exactly that. The jacket copy reaches for Instagram, and for once the comparison is earned.

There is a lesson in the evenness that outlasts the novelty. Shore treats attention as the whole job, the decision about where to point the camera made a hundred times a day without fuss and without ranking. Study the sequence and the ordinary begins to look chargeable, worth the frame, which is harder to teach than any lighting setup. The pictures argue that the world is already interesting and the photographer's task is mostly to notice.

The revised and expanded edition is where a reader has to make a decision. The original 2005 sequence ran a tight 320 pictures, and part of its force came from that restraint, the sense of a journey with edges. Adding images deepens the archive and slightly loosens the discipline that made the first version hum. It is a generous edition, and generosity is not always what this particular project wanted; the leaner Shore of Factory and the cooler Shore of From Galilee to the Negev show how much his work depends on knowing when to stop.

Which returns to the first impression, the one that reads these as pictures anyone could have taken. Sit with them in order and the opposite becomes clear. The apparent indifference was the most disciplined decision in the work, a refusal to rank the world that took enormous control to hold.