Uncommon Places Revisited

Uncommon Places Revisited is a research project conducted from home in 2025. It is based on the 2002 extended Thames & Hudson reissue of photographer Stephen Shore’s 1982 book Uncommon Places, which features large format colour film photographs taken at various locations across America and Canada in the 1970s. I will not attempt to describe the book or its broader impact here, instead I will focus on its impact on me and how far I took my enjoyment of its contents.

I did not study photography in college so my current knowledge of the history of photography has mostly come from documentaries, YouTube videos and my library of books. My learning has been freeform and led by own interests and aesthetic taste. It was very late in my photographic life that I came across the group of photographers known as the New Topographics. I instantly recognised that these were my people and that I was fifty years late to the party. It turns out I was photographing in a very similar way at the other side of the Atlantic Ocean half a century later and I was not alone, the New Topographics had influenced a whole world of photographers. Interestingly some of these new New Topographics specifically seek out scenes that have as much of the original (now retro) style intact, but there are others who photograph with a less nostalgic eye.

The term New Topographics began as the title of an exhibition, held in 1975 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York and in that context referred specifically to the featured group of photographers, namely Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, and last but not least Stephen Shore, the only photographer in the show to use colour. The term New Topographics has since been used to describe a photographic movement defined by its approach to photographing the man-altered landscape. The accompanying book for the exhibition, long out of print, is hard to come by at a reasonable price. I have ordered a copy from the upcoming reprint, which was due in Summer 2025 but was postponed. A couple of years ago I purchased American Silence (2021) by Robert Adams, the catalogue for the 2022 Bernd and Hilla Becher show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Uncommon Places (2002) by Stephen Shore. These would keep me going.

By the time I came across these photographers I had been photographing intensively for a few years and was developing a more personal take on the various landscapes I now frequented due to new personal circumstances. I related to the New Topographics and enjoyed reading about them and listening to interviews. It gave context and precedent to what I was doing and the considerable amount of thinking and writing that had come about because of their work helped me gain insights about my own approach and instincts.

I really appreciate the Adams and Becher books which I consumed with gusto first time around and have revisited many times since, but it was Uncommon Places by Stephen Shore that became a real touchstone. His preceding project American Surfaces (1972) pioneered the use of the 35mm snapshot aesthetic in an art context but Uncommon Places was to be quite the opposite, having being shot with a large format camera, every image made with intention and precision. This process is the photographic equivalent of painting en plein-air. Using this type of camera is quite complicated and laboursome but the resulting control of composition and perspective has huge benefits. It is the combination of the high resolution, perspective control, rich colour palette and dead-pan observation of obscure beauty that I find so appealing about this project. I find the overall result very seductive and the component qualities are very close to what I have in mind when I lift a camera to my own eye.

At this point I must address the elephant in the room or perhaps it is two elephants, namely nostalgia and Americana. Let me be clear, Shore photographed these scenes in his own time with no sense of nostalgia. Sure, by the 1970’s there may have been some nostalgia in American society for the 1950’s and the trappings of much earlier eras also feature in the photographs but overall Shore was just photographing things as they were in the 1970s and this includes cars, architecture and fashion.

Americana and the cross-country road trip have captured the imagination of people all over the world and I am no exception. In 2012 I scratched the itch and drove from Tennessee to Pennsylvania taking in the Blueridge Parkway and I made a particular effort to visit significant Civil War sites along the way. Despite some of the reality checks I experienced, mostly concerning scale and distance, I continued to fantasise about future road trips in different parts of the country. In my youth I had read On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac, later I picked up the trail in Electric Kool-aid Acid Test (1968) by Tom Wolfe and in adulthood I read Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Travel with Charley (1962) by John Steinbeck. This was all supplemented by an overwhelming amount of American television and movies. Across all of it there is a sense of vastness, materialism, beauty and horror all interacting in a uniquely American way. The Wild West is still alive and well in terms of how America is perceived culturally and recent political events have made sure of this.

The book Uncommon Places is my way of going on an American road trip and time travelling from the safety of my own home without damaging the environment or spending any money, except for the seventy euros I paid for the book. The publication is a feast for the eyes. Putting aside nostalgia and Americana there is simply a huge amount of detail to observe and pour over. As Shore might put it he creates worlds for us to move our attention through. The images have the resonance of his ‘conscious attention’ and we can share in his state of heightened awareness. So many of the images feature extremely pleasing compositions, lighting and colour. By his own admission particular compositions saw him reach the pinnacle of ‘structural density’, taking great care in the positioning of multiple elements in relation to each other (e.g. Pg 131). There are other images that are less complex or punchy but these provide balance in the book and still put you in the moment with the photographer. He was in all kinds of places, and we are along for the ride.

As with a lot of good photo books part of the joy in experiencing Uncommon Places is derived from the sequencing of the images. There are really pleasing and playful pairings and some with more subtle connections that take a bit of figuring out. I do not tire of looking at this book. Of all the books I own it is the one I can pick up and enjoy instantly, so much so that it has become a kind of therapeutic instrument. My wife knows I have had a bad day when I take my ‘picture book’ to bed. In truth I don’t have to have had a bad day, but it does cheer me up to look at it. This book always delivers.

Incidentally I was born between pages 131 and 132 of this book on July 12, 1975, so I was still in the womb for the first part of the road trip and new to the world for the later part. I am conscious of this as I read the dates in each caption. I think of my small self in relation to the photographed moments. I also wonder about the people in the photos. One night whilst looking through the book I had the notion of Googling one of the few named people who feature in the book and then I did another. I then went into Google maps and found one of the featured intersections in street view, took a screenshot and labelled the image with the book page number and caption. I was instantly hooked. This became known as ‘the game’. If my wife saw me grab the ‘picture book’ and my laptop she knew ‘the game’ was on and that I would be engrossed for an hour or two. The majority of the work on this fun project was done on Sunday mornings which is my first morning off in the week. I find it hard to wind down and switch off from the day job running a gallery. I am physically exhausted from working and commuting so I must remain stationary. I typically lie on the bed with our two cats and occupy myself with something that distracts my brain but allows my body to rest.

The process of researching locations on Google maps and street view was not unfamiliar to me. During my career as an archaeologist the advent of Google maps, readily available aerial photography, digitised historic maps and street view had a huge impact on how I worked as I could do reconnaissance of sites from the comfort of the office. Thankfully Shore has a thing for intersections and documented the two relevant street names in his captions, at least most of the time. This allowed me to drop myself at that intersection in street view, find the correct orientation and get a screenshot without much trouble. However there were limitations due to the position of the Google car and unavoidable obstructions but in a lot of cases I could get close enough to make the location recognisable to anyone familiar with the book.

Some of the searches were epic, especially when the caption only gave a road name and that road was very long or if I just had a town name to go on. In some cases I had to settle for an approximation that had the same vibe of the original photograph but was by no means accurate. In the harder to pinpoint cases I used the aerial view a lot as I am very good at finding things this way. As an archaeological surveyor I spent a lot of time looking at the world from above in map and photographic form and some of my efforts finding Shore’s locations were nothing short of TV worthy. In some cases I was able to magnify a detail such as a house number or the name of a business.

For research into businesses that have since closed, AI became a useful tool in tracking down information. It often told me what business came next on that spot or if the building had been demolished. Sometimes AI brought me to a very niche neighbourhood nostalgia Facebook group where such things were discussed. However AI was not always accurate and occasionally threw me off the scent.

This project was never intended to result in a direct ‘then and now’ comparison. It is inspired by the book so if you don’t have the book you can’t play ‘the game’. The least I can do, to thank Stephen Shore and Thames & Hudson, is encourage you to buy the book and I don’t want to reproduce their images in any sub-standard or illegal way. Just buy the book! You wont regret it.

My captions start with the page number from the 2002 book. At the end I have also included the details of images for which I could not find a suitable screenshot. You are welcome to try.