Since about 1970, Shore has exclusively used color. Looking at the pictures in ''Biographical Landscape," one can see why he likes it so much. Black and white abstracts and classicizes. It takes the two-dimensional artifice of a photograph and places it that much farther from the color-defined world in which we live.
On his travels, Shore used a Deardorff view camera. The Deardorff sits on a tripod and requires a long exposure time. It produces extremely detailed images, which more than compensates for the resulting loss of point-and-click spontaneity. Or at least it does when a photographer has the eye for slyly uninflected composition Shore does.
Much of the informality Shore lost using a Deardorff he regained by using color. Color enlivens and energizes, lending an immediacy and verisimilitude unavailable in black and white. That's especially so when it's used as skillfully as Shore uses it. There's nothing garish or proclamatory about his use of color. Color in Shore's pictures is like affluence in American life: It's just there, a wondrous lubricant, taken for granted, and all the more agreeable for that matter of factness.
Consider the gradations of green Shore gets from a pair of paddles lying akimbo on a ping-pong table in ''Causeway Inn, Tampa, Florida, November, 17, 1977." Even better is ''Ginger Shore, Miami, Florida, November 12, 1977." One of the few portraits here, it shows the photographer's future wife standing before a wall, a bag on each shoulder, looking off in three-quarter profile. How could a woman not marry a man capable of recording her like this? The red of her checked shirt, the brown bricks behind her, her orange-red hair, the red of the smaller bag, the brown of her eyes: They compose a fantasia on gingeriness, a breathtaking procession of modulations.
''I was interested more in the ordinary, of things not happening in your life," Shore has said of these '70s pictures. He gave them the overall title ''Uncommon Places," and so much of their impact lies in the tension Shore maintains between the ordinary and the uncommon.
