Is it me or nobody has so far commented on the fact that Shore works in series?
His medium is not the individual frame, but the aggregated, serialized set of images. If you pickup American Surfaces, you will see that this is quite obvious. His best-known work, Uncommon Places has more photographs that stand individually as tableaus, but it remains a series.
His work reaches all the way back to Walker Evans, who himself can be said to reach to Atget. If you look at his pictures, like his forebears', they are pictorially competent in a very traditional manner (compositionally structured, tonally harmonious, etc), while at the same time eschewing the extravagant, the flashy, or the high-impact style of more accessible photographers.
The link with the New Topographics is meaningful not in the sense of participation in a "movement" but rather in kinship of intent: document with a precise eye the lived and built environment.
I don't think the question "What makes it art" involves an answer that must satisfy the criterion "art that so and so likes". There's plenty of art out there that I hate (literally, I don't even give it a passing "well in a way it's kind of interesting") but it does not prevent me from calling it art.
I hope it's the same for other people. I personally like Shore, but even if I didn't like him I wouldn't have much trouble considering him as art.
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