Stephen Shore’s Precocious Adolescent Eye

To call Stephen Shore the most precocious photographer in the history of the medium is almost correct. Technically, the French boy wonder Jacques Henri Lartigue, who took his first picture at the age of seven, beat him by a couple of years. Shore had reached the comparatively ancient age of twelve when he created the first image that appears in the newly released book, “ Early Work ,” published by Mack, which presents pictures he made between 1960 and 1965, the vast majority of which have never before been published. But whereas Lartigue concerned himself with boyish subject matter—racecars, flying machines, the choreographed high jinks of his governesses—and the fashionable trappings of the Belle Époque, Shore seems to have barrelled into his adolescence as a fully formed artist. His wo