Born in 1947 in New York, American photographer Steven Shore started taking pictures as a child when he discovered Walker Evans’ book American Photographs. Before becoming an emblematic American colourist in the 1970s and travelling the vast open landscapes of the USA, immortalised in series such as Uncommon Places, he was one of very few photographers to assiduously frequent Andy Warhol’s Factory from 1965–1967, taking black-and-white shots of this microcosm of New York’s underground. Warhol, and the artists who gravitated to this collective studio, decisively influenced his work. In the manner of Warhol, whom he said painted like a machine, Steven Shore focused his exploration on ‘signs of indifference’, a certain distantiation from the photographed models, and a quest for banality. He shot systematically, at regular intervals, without trying to catch a decisive moment; rather, he proposed a sequential reading of the life of this phalanstery-cum-studio, and captured its pulse, which beat to the rhythm of the Velvet Underground’s rehearsals. His shots of the band in rehearsal provide an essential testimony that help understand the complicity and conversations between the Velvet Underground and their host at the Factory. ‘We were made for each other. The subjects of our songs, which were written before we met, totally matched the subjects of his films. [] Andy gave us the chance to be the Velvet Underground. We were basically nothing, zilch, no one knew us, no one was interested. [] And occasionally he’d say, “You’d better put disgusting words in this song, or don’t change the lyrics—and especially, you’ve gotta perform the LP version!” Or “Why don’t you write a song about Edie Sedgwick?” [] “Don’t you think she’s a femme fatale, Lou? So I wrote Femme fatale. He often made that kind of suggestion, after which I’d start writing,’ explains Lou Reed.
