He sold prints to MoMA at fourteen. He shot Warhol's Factory at seventeen. He hung at the Met at twenty-three. Then he drove into the flattest, most ordinary corners of America.

Most photographers would ride that arc for fifty years. Stephen Shore looked around and thought: I have no idea what this country looks like. So in 1972 he drove into the America between the cities with a pocket camera chosen for looking amateurish, photographed every meal, every bed, every gas station, developed the film like anyone's holiday snaps, and taped around 220 drugstore prints to the wall of New York's Light Gallery: pancakes and motel bedspreads, at eye level, in an art gallery. He hung up America's junk drawer and said, calmly: this is what our life actually looks like. Somebody should take it seriously.

Then he went the other way: an 8×1 ...