A camera and a car

STEPHEN SHORE, a precocious teenage chronicler of the Andy Warhol Factory scene, was in his 20s when he headed west on a road trip in 1973.

He drove alone across the U.S., compiling a visual record of a vanishing American vernacular and kept a daily log of such details as what TV shows he watched (“Mission: Impossible,” the Watergate hearings) and what he spent ($4 to fill the tank; $5 for a meal).

“A Road Trip Journal by Stephen Shore” (a hefty $250 time capsule from Phaidon Press) commemorates the 35th anniversary of that trip. The edition encompasses hundreds of images and replicates yellowing pages of credit-card receipts, postcards, playbills, local newspaper ads and handwritten lists from the influential photographer’s youthful odyssey.

“I was interested in a culture in transition,” Shore said by phone from Venice, Italy, where he had just finished a shoot for Elle magazine. “It was the beginning of the strip culture, strip architecture, fast-food restaurants, but there was also a lot from before that still had a presence then.”

Through Shore’s lens, shabby motel bedrooms and bathrooms, ramshackle storefronts, solitary houses and derelict spaces endure in detached isolation. Some are uncannily Edward Hopperish, a reflection perhaps, Shore said, of his interest in the artist’s work: “Not so much the narrative aspect of it, but more the kind of psychological meaning of architecture and the way a building sits in light.”

While Shore used a large-format camera on a tripod, his goal was the observational snapshot effect of his “American Surfaces” series, shot the year before. The best of those 35mm images had no pretense to art and communicated an experience of the world without an overlay of visual convention, Shore said. However, he added, what a photographer chooses to include, or not, unavoidably conveys meaning and portent.

“The idea behind this project was to take the selecting process beyond photography,” he said. “There is an old Arab saying that I like -- ‘The apparent is the bridge to the real.’

” Shore, director of the photography program at Bard College in upstate New York, still loves to drive but isn’t contemplating future cross-country trips. “A job, a family, two dogs, six cats and three goats make it very hard.”

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lynne.heffley@latimes.com