"American Surfaces", Stephen Shore"s ground-breaking and largely unpublished series of photographs from 1972-3, took documentary photography to a new level. When first exhibited at the Light Gallery in New York this visual diary of Shore"s travels across the United States confounded critics. Displayed as hundreds and hundreds of colour photographs, processed simply at Kodak"s labs in New Jersey, they were a stark contrast to the formal, black-and-white prints that were recognized as art photography at the time. Despite its unfavorable reviews, the show was bought in its entirety by Weston Naef, then Curator of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where 220 of the photographs now reside. "American Surfaces" has since become the benchmark for documenting our fast-living, consumer-orientated world, a body of work that followed on from Walker Evans and Robert Prank"s experiences of crossing the United States and which continues to influence photographers today. ...