Uncommon
Related:
greatness -
original -
rare -
scarce -
unique
Contrast:
common
Definition
- Not common; rare.
- Wonderful; remarkable.
--AHD
Uncommon Places : The Complete Works (1982) Stephen Shore
Related: greatness - original - rare - scarce - unique
Contrast: common
Uncommon Places : The Complete Works (1982) Stephen Shore [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
From Publishers Weekly
A teenaged photographic aspirant who hung around at Andy Warhol’s factory in its mid-60s heyday, Shore found success early: his first show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was held when he was only 23. These 152 full-page, full-color shots comprise his serial project of the 70s, "Uncommon Places," which documented roadside America with a dispassionate, Andy-like emptiness. It’s an aesthetic that has been endlessly co-opted by American filmmakers like Gus Van Sant and Jim Jarmusch, but some of these 12 7/8" × 10 5/16" shots of prairies, parking lots, polyester-clad couples and plastic hotel furnishings manage to seem fresh nonetheless. Shore’s concluding interview with Lynn Tillman makes the Warhol connection explicit, and argues for a kind of meaning-making from the void: "Formalism often sounds like a kind of visual nicety, but if I use it, that’s not how I mean it." Beautiful, lush reproductions with minimal captions allow the photos to speak for themselves.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Book Description
Originally published by Aperture in 1982 and long unavailable, Stephen Shore's now legendary book Uncommon Places has influenced a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography. Uncommon Places--his visionary series of images of the American vernacular landscape of the seventies and early eighties--stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past three decades.
Uncommon Places: The Complete Works presents an expanded, definitive collection of the early work of this major artist, much of which has never before been published or exhibited. In 1972 Shore set out with a friend for Amarillo, Texas and--like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him--discovered a hitherto unarticulated vision of America via highway and camera.
Shore approaches his subjects with cool objectivity, the photographs seemingly devoid of drama or commentary. Yet each image has been distilled, retaining precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which a parking lot emptied of people, a hotel bedroom, or a building on a side street assumes both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. In contrast to Shore's signature landscape images, this new, expanded survey of the original series reveals equally substantial collections of interiors and portraits.
Shore's broad influence can be seen today in the work of countless contemporary photographers--Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Catherine Opie among them. Uncommon Places: The Complete WorksUncommon Places : The Complete Works (2004) Stephen Shore provides an opportunity to reexamine the diverse implications of Shore's groundbreaking project and offers a fundamental primer for the last thirty years of large-format color photography. --via Amazon.com
Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism (1989) - Jim Collins
Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism (1989) - Jim Collins [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Book Description
Jim Collins argues that postmodernism and popular culture have together undermined the master system of "culture." By looking at a wide range of texts and forms he investigates what happens to the notion of culture once different discourses begin to envision that culture in conflicting ways, constructing often contradictory visions of it simultaneously.
Similarly, many critics exalt stories which feature a lone hero fighting for his ideals against an inert and amoral system. Thus Jim Collins in Uncommon Cultures (1989:30-31) sees crime fiction opposing a smart private detective and an inefficient police force as a critique of state justice. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture_studies#The_possibility_of_a_.22subversive.22_popular_culture [Nov 2004]