New York City, New York
Stephen Shore American
Not on view
Growing up in New York City, Shore visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art frequently as a child. When he was nine years old, he received a Ricoh 35mm rangefinder camera and used it to make black-and-white photographs, which he developed and printed in his own darkroom. As an ambitious fourteen-year-old, he made an appointment to show his photographs to the Museum of Modern Art’s head of photography, Edward Steichen, who purchased three prints for the museum’s Study Collection. Among them was this image of a little boy seated on a bench in the Met’s galleries. Nattily dressed in a tailored jacket and shorts, the boy stares back with a wide-eyed, open-mouthed gaze and an air of precociousness that mirrors that of the young artist behind the camera.
