The Velvet Years

I was a just a kid–17, living in Manhattan. This was pre-Max’s Kansas City. During that period, I made a film which was shown at the Filmmaker’s Cinemateque. It had a reputation for presenting underground films. The very same night that I showed my film, one of Warhol’s 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)