Stephen Shore (born 1947) is an American photographer and artist who is widely credited with pioneering the use of color photography in the 1970s. He is best known for his large-scale color photographs of everyday life in the United States, which he began taking in the early 1970s.
Shore was born in New York City and grew up in a family of photographers. His father, Stephen Shore Sr., was a fashion photographer and his mother, Edith Shore, was a photojournalist. From an early age, he was exposed to photography and began taking pictures at age eight. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1964 to 1966 before dropping out to pursue photography full-time.
In 1971, Shore became the first living photographer to have a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. His work has since been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world and is held in many public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The National Gallery of Canada.
Shore's work has been highly influential on subsequent generations of photographers and artists. He has published several books including Uncommon Places (1982), American Surfaces (1999), and Stephen Shore: Selected Works 1973-1981 (2005). In 2017 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his ongoing project "The Nature of Photographs".
In addition to his photographic work, Shore has taught extensively at institutions such as Bard College, Yale University, Cooper Union, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Parsons School of Design. He currently lives and works in New York City.