Stephen Shore's photographs of 'ordinary' America have had an extraordinary impct. He spent the 1970s crisscrossing the continent to assemble his two best knwn bodies of work, "American Surfaces" and "Uncommon Places". These photograph focused on the minutiae of modern American life, unveiling the exceptional beuty to be found in banality and pioneering the two most important photographicdioms of the past thirty years: the diaristic snapshot (later taken up by suc artists as Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans) and the monumentalized landscapeas practiced by Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky). Shore was also one of theirst art photogaphers to work in colour, capturing the sky blues, mustard yellws and avocado greens of a nation whose chromatic enthusiasm occasionally outsripped its taste.;Less well known are Shore's earlier works. While still in hih school in the mid-1960s he undertook a three-year a project shooting Andy Wahol's legendary studio, The Factory, at its creative peak, with a revolving cat of characters that included the Velvet Underground and Nico, Edie Sedwick an of course Warhol himself. Soon after, inspired by the intellectually fertile

Joel Sternfeld teaches photography at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York.