Above image: Mineral Wells, Texas, June 1972. © Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

When US photographer Stephen Shore first showed his seminal series American Surfaces at the White Gallery in New York some fifty years ago, critics were left confounded. Not only were the 174 postcard-sized photographs in colour (considered inferior among the monochrome heavyweights of the day), they were unframed and mounted on the wall using double-sided tape. A new book from Phaidon revisits the groundbreaking series with an updated and expanded edition that includes 40 unpublished photographs.

Shore’s fearless aptitude for challenging status quo would characterise his widely celebrated career, one that started a decade before his White Gallery exhibition as one of two in-house photographers at Andy Warhol‘s Factory. Adopting the approach of his mentor, Shore embraced the banal and everyday in his work. Not only did this approach extend to what he photographed but how he photographed, opting to process film at local drugstores for an imprecise, amateur finish that no doubt added to the critics’ perplexity.

It wasn’t just Shore’s unorthodox techniques that helped immortalise American Surfaces. In choosing to photograph dingy motel rooms, empty parking lots and grey plates of food, Shore defied Henri Cartier-Bresson’s assertion that photography was about capturing split-second occurrences, or as he called it, the “decisive moment”.

Nothing about American Surfaces feels decisive or urgent. If anything, the reverse is true, with scenes that are both familiar and unchanging. Shore’s emotional presence in these images is omitted in favour of neutral observation, resulting in anthropological images that force us to observe what we would otherwise readily dismiss. As Shore himself said of the series, “I wanted pictures that felt as natural as speaking.”

Taken as a visual diary during his travels across America, Shore tapped into the mythologised vision of Americana and its lonesome highways first laid down by the likes of Jack Kerouac and Walker Evans and later taken up on-screen by Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch. In this sense, the series has only grown as an object of ethnographic value, with Shore’s sensitive and often humorous lens capturing the zeitgeist of early 70s America that now appears eons ago.

William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz and Joel Sternfield would go on to champion colour photography within the American canon, yet comparatively, Shore remains underappreciated for his invaluable contribution. The familiarity of Shore’s style in a contemporary context results from the fact he inspired so many of today’s most celebrated names, from Nan Goldin to Wolfgang Tillmans and Martin Parr, Shore’s pioneering approach laid the conceptual groundwork for a new way of documenting the world.

Stephen Shore: American Surfaces is published by Phaidon on April 3 and is available here.