Plight of the comet

Today it’s common for collectors, even museums, to buy works from artists still in school. Although it’s too early to tell if such instant success will damage these young artists’ development, an exhibition at UCLA’s Hammer Museum tells a cautionary tale from an earlier era, before the art market got superheated and it became increasingly difficult to say “mature works” with a straight face.

“The Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1968-1993” outlines an instance of early success and unfulfilled promise. It was organized for the Aperture Foundation of New York by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, a professor at the Hochschule fur bildende Kunste in Hamburg, Germany, and a visiting scholar at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Chronologically installed in four galleries, the 84 works rarely travel beyond the themes and ideas Shore set out in 1972 and 1973, depicting the peculiar mixture of averageness and oddity in commercial culture across the United States and Canada.

The seven series in the first gallery, made from 1969 to 1971, are unremarkable exercises that show Shore exploring the formal issues of the time. Predominantly black and white, many isolate a single component and let it play out over time.

For example, “KT Ranch” documents clouds moving through the sky. Another sequence records Shore’s block-by-block walk along a New York avenue. A third piece is a selection of pictures from his vast collection of found photographs.

Like much Conceptual art and structuralist film from the 1960s, these works focus on the way time and space are experienced via images. If Shore had gone to art school, they would be called his student work.

The next gallery features Shore’s signature images. To make “American Surfaces” (1972) and “Uncommon Places” (1973 to 1978), he got in a car and traveled across the country, taking pictures of the motels and restaurants he visited, the meals he ate, the beds he slept in, the sites he saw, the folks he met and the parking lots in which he left his car for the night.

Banality is palpable in “American Surfaces.” Each of the three inkjet prints in the exhibition is a grid of 24 pictures. Each of these snapshot-size images looks as if it has been rejected from a tourist’s scrapbook, because it didn’t come out as intended or capture the excitement of the trip.

That’s Shore’s point. He took Andy Warhol’s deadpan urbanity out of Manhattan and into the heartland, where it lacked the cool dissonance it had in the big city. In Middle America, cockeyed detachment comes off as arrogant, sophomoric, condescending. Although this approach served Warhol well in the studio -- by deflating the pretensions of overwrought Expressionism -- it’s not a solid foundation for documentary photography. That’s why the show is called “The Biographical Landscape.” It’s all about Shore.

In 1973, Shore continued his transcontinental trips but got a better camera and more expensive film. He also printed his pictures larger and presented them individually, each in its own frame.

Booths in diners, puddles in parking lots and signs along highways are displayed beside pictures of phone booths, car dealerships, street corners, apartments and houses. People rarely appear in Shore’s work. When they do, they stand impassively, their backs against textured walls. Their modest presence accentuates the absence of humanity in most of the images.

Sixty-three of these digital C-prints hang in the second, third and fourth galleries, which also include five large landscape photographs from 1979 to 1990 and six photo albums from 2003 and 2004. Over the years, Shore’s eye for composition improved. Point-and-shoot casualness gave way to greater deliberation in framing and shot selection. But such technical finesse does not compensate for the static, stuck-in-the-past atmosphere of the exhibition, or pictures that repeatedly focus on the quotidian details locals overlook but artsy visitors fetishize.

Shore’s career as a photographer could have been scripted in Hollywood. In 1961, at the age of 14, the precocious New Yorker phoned Edward Steichen, the photography curator for New York’s Museum of Modern Art. They arranged a meeting, and Steichen purchased three of Shore’s photographs for the museum’s permanent collection.

At 17, Shore spent his evenings and weekends at Warhol’s Factory, watching a pro in action and taking pictures of the scene. In 1971, when he was 23, Shore became the first living photographer to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Eleven years later, the self-taught photographer was appointed director of the photography program at Bard College, a position he holds today.

It’s hard to imagine a career with more institutional support. But careers and bodies of work do not necessarily follow the same course.

In Shore’s case, the level of institutional endorsement far outweighs the work.

“The Biographical Landscape” suggests an inward-turning spiral that feels increasingly guarded and fussed-over. Imagine Nan Goldin’s photographs without the melodrama or Wolfgang Tillmans’ without the stylishness. That leaves Shore too little room in which to maneuver.

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‘The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1968-1993’

Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Oct. 16

Price: Free through Sept. 4; then adults $5, seniors $3

Info: (310) 443-7000, www.hammer.ucla.edu