The Velvet Years
I
was a just a kid17, living in Manhattan. This was pre-Maxs
Kansas City. During that period, I made a film which was shown at the
Filmmakers Cinemateque. It had a reputation for presenting
underground films. The very same night that I showed my film, one of
Warhols was being shown. He was there and I got to meet him and
starting hanging out with him and his group. I documented them for over
three years and the result was the book The Velvet Years.--
Stephen Shore

The
photographs in The Velvet Years, taken by US photographer Stephen Shore,
depict the scene in Andy Warhol's infamous studio, The Factory. Shore
captures a time when Warhol was emerging as a prominent visual artist and
avant-grade filmmaker. Warhol's Factory is populated with a diverse group
of musicians, actors, writers and aspiring cultural sophisticates,
including some familiar faces.
Stephen Shore was
interested in photography from an early age. Self-taught, he received a
photographic darkroom kit at age six. He began to use a 35mm camera three
years later and made his first color photographs. At age seventeen Shore
met Andy Warhol and began to frequent Warhol's studio, the Factory,
photographing Warhol and the creative people that surrounded him. Among
the first to work almost exclusively in color, Shore, in 1971, became the
first living photographer to have a one-person show at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York.
Lynne Tillman, Associate
Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the
University at Albany, is the author of four novels, two collections of
short stories, one collection of essays and two nonfiction books. She has
collaborated often with artists and writes regularly on culture.
Stephen Shore
creeps into the seams of Americana and presents us with the truth of our
culture, detached, without decoration or deception. (Picture Magazine)