Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places
Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC - To July 19
Originally published in book form in 1982, Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places is the quiet link between the black-and-white rural delirium of Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1971) and the claustrophobic bacchanal of Nan Goldin’s New York City–set Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). Placed in the context of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s photography collection, where its 800 chromogenic prints now reside as a recent gift from the Chan Family, the link could just as easily land between the reformatted slide prints of Fred Herzog and the luminescent light boxes of Jeff Wall.
Unlike the locally set books of Clark and Goldin, Shore’s series is a travelogue, the result of multiple road trips he took throughout the US and Canada between 1973 and 1981. During the Manhattan to Amarillo leg, it occurred to Shore that what he was seeing was as much about light and colour as it was about the line-and-form towns he was passing through. Initial forays in 35 mm were followed by his use of a 4 x 5 view camera, before settling on the 8 x 10 format. The result is, for its time, a stunning juxtaposition of low-content subject matter captured by a high production camera.
The VAG’s debut of Uncommon Places features a selection of photos presented as part of the gallery’s Highlights from the Collection exhibition. In the words of VAG interim co-CEO and curator at large Eva Respini: “Vancouver has long occupied a significant place in the international history of photography, home to artists whose work has shaped global discourse. To hold this series in depth allows us to place Shore’s vision in meaningful dialogue with that legacy, deepening both the history we tell and the experience we offer our audiences.”
This exhibition is part of the 2026 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.
