Stephen Shore’s Precocious Adolescent Eye

How did this happen? To begin with, Shore had an uncommonly encouraging and generous family. His uncle Leo, a naval engineer, noticed that his nephew was a budding tinkerer and gave him a Kodak photo-chemistry set for his sixth birthday. (In an essay for the new book, Shore recalls, “It was as though this gift uncovered something that was buried in me.”) His parents subsequently let him turn a bathroom in their apartment in Peter Cooper Village into a darkroom, where he occupied himself developing and printing family photos. When he was eight, they bought him his first camera, a 35-mm. Ricoh.

His parents were also the kind of people who, that same year, would drag their son to a production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” But they were not, in Shore’s telling, particularly interested in art, or necessarily hoping that their son’s hobby would become a profession. “I think they were proud of what I was doing,” Shore, now seventy-seven, told me during a recent afternoon I spent with him in his old brick house in Tivoli, New York. “But, at the same time, they expected me to follow a more traditional path—like, not drop out of school.” (Their hopes were, of course, dashed: at seventeen, Shore dropped the flimsy pretense that he was any kind of high-school student, then spent three years hanging out with Andy Warhol and acting as the unofficial photographer at the Factory, before rocketing to his own art stardom. “I don’t know how I got away with going to as little school as I did,” he said.)