Joel Sternfeld

In the late 1960s, about a month after he began taking photographs, Sternfeld decided that color was necessary to convey changes of season and atmosphere. He reached this conclusion after photographing the same landscape in color and black and white, printing both versions, and comparing them. The experiment opened a larger question: what were the aesthetic principles of color photography, and where did its greatest strength lie?^*11 In the mid-1970s, while following the seasons at Nags Head, North Carolina, Sternfeld faced a serious health scare and the accidental death of his brother Gabriel. After returning to New York, he experienced a moment on the Rockaway shoreline when the colors of apartment blocks, sand, and an overcast sky formed a coherent order. He later recalled that the resulting photograph directed the course of his subsequent work.^*11 Color harmony consequently became a way to perceive a disordered reality as a whole, instead of a rule for selecting beautiful subjects. His early First Pictures used a 35mm camera to photograph figures and gestures on the street. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978 then enabled extended journeys through suburbs, farmland, industrial zones, and roads beyond the city.^*1 Sternfeld described his task as a search for beauty and harmony within an increasingly standardized and technological nation, guided by a childhood memory of an “ordered, rural America.”^*2 The move from 35mm to an 8×10-inch view camera gave him a method for observing nature, architecture, human activity, and the traces of consumption as relations across an entire landscape.

Color Photography: Season and Atmosphere

Color was central to the construction of meaning in Sternfeld’s photographs. He studied the color theories of Josef Albers, Paul Klee, and Johannes Itten and photographed the way adjacent hues alter one another’s brightness and temperature within a landscape. Yet these theories of painting did not provide a universal system that could simply be transferred to photography.^*11 Sternfeld instead pursued photographs whose meaning arose through the operation of color. Autumn orange signals season; the colors of road signs and building materials indicate development and consumption; collisions between natural and manufactured colors register changes in the land. Drawing as well on social historian Lewis Mumford’s idea that each era possesses a characteristic color system, Sternfeld identified low-saturation pastel tones of similar density as the colors of the technological America emerging in the late 1970s and early 1980s.^*11 Color carried atmosphere and social history at once, linking personal perception to changes across the nation.

From 35mm to 8×10

In the early 1970s, Sternfeld learned to react quickly to the street with a 35mm camera. Street photography had already developed a sophisticated vocabulary of speed, grain, blur, and tilted framing for the modern city, and he began pursuing questions that extended beyond the urban instant.^*2 With an 8×10-inch view camera, he set up a tripod, inspected every part of the frame, and waited for the movement of people and cars to enter the space. During the journeys funded by his Guggenheim Fellowship, he often limited himself to about two negatives a day and used a journal in his car at night to imagine scenes for the next day.^*11 This slow procedure turned a house fire and a farm stand, a road and a collapsed elephant, or flood damage and a housing development into what has been described as a “narrative tableau,” encompassing both the central event and the surrounding uses of land.^*2 Clues dispersed across the broad frame invite viewers to infer multiple timelines and causes, making their own judgment part of the work.

American Prospects: Beauty and Devastation

American Prospects moves across places where housing, agriculture, industry, and leisure have altered the land, drawing on “prospects” as both a future outlook and a physical view of America. Sternfeld researched each region’s industries, seasons, geology, vegetation, and literature, then photographed the many roles through which people manage, preserve, decorate, control, and damage the land.^*2 Derelict factories, suburban development, and the remains of disasters appear alongside the unmistakable beauty of light, climate, and the horizon. The text for the 2003 edition describes the book’s America as a nation filled with gleaming new construction while its human spirit remains deeply uneasy.^*2 The precision of large-format color prevents social problems from being reduced to accusatory symbols. It sustains the contradiction of people loving the land as they use it, and ordering it as they harm it. The “harmony” Sternfeld sought gave perceptible order to fractures in reality while keeping those fractures present in the image.

McLean, Virginia: Can a Photograph Explain Cause?

In McLean, Virginia, December 4, 1978, a firefighter in the foreground selects a pumpkin at a farm stand while smoke and flames rise from a house in the distance.^*3 Sternfeld remained apart from the fire, arranging the stand, firefighter, road, and house along the depth of the frame. The orange of the pumpkins, protective clothing, and flames connects the scene visually, while the photograph offers no explanation for the firefighter’s actions. Anne Tucker has discussed the image as a representative example of Sternfeld’s distance from an event and his retention of a broad setting and abundant information.^*2 Viewers may infer dereliction of duty, a break, or a training exercise from the visible arrangement. Because the photograph withholds the information needed to settle those stories, its irony also addresses the viewer’s habit of converting visual placement into causality.

After a Flash Flood and Exhausted Renegade Elephant

After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California records cars pushed through mud, broken ground, and houses on a slope as terrain remade by a flood.^*4 In Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington, June 1979, a collapsed elephant appears at the convergence of a sheriff’s car, onlookers, road markings, and power lines.^*5 Kelly Brougher noted how the elephant is absorbed into the landscape, whose road, buildings, and rough vegetation appear equally exhausted.^*2 Sternfeld often chose the moment when an extraordinary event had begun to enter the ordinary appearance of a place. His equal attention to the residual signs of an event and its surroundings later developed in On This Site into a structure for reading past violence through a quiet present.

On This Site: Memory, Place, and Text

The 1996 series On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam photographs locations across the United States associated with murder, political violence, racism, and accidents as present-day landscapes in which few traces of the events remain. The official description explains its pairing of crime-scene sites with short texts that restore lost histories to places that appear peaceful.^*6 Images of houses, roads, parking lots, and vacant land describe the present surface precisely, while the writing identifies the events and the people involved. The gap in time reveals how quickly a place can recover an innocent appearance and how fragile the institutions that preserve memory can be. Sternfeld has repeatedly questioned the habit of treating the photographic grain as fact itself and has stressed that a photograph cannot convey a subject’s entire history.^*7 He assigned different functions to image and text and made the distance between them a form of memory.

Stranger Passing: Distance in Environmental Portraiture

Stranger Passing is a series of environmental portraits made between 1985 and 2000, photographing people Sternfeld encountered across the United States together with roads, parking lots, commercial sites, and residential districts. SFMOMA’s 2001 exhibition connected individual portraits to late-twentieth-century American culture through approximately sixty-five large-format color photographs.^*8 The distance between camera and person remains broadly consistent: the subjects pause and return the lens’s gaze. Clothing, occupation, possessions, and setting offer signs of social position without reducing a life to a single type. Douglas R. Nickel has discussed the tension between a procedure that recalls August Sander’s social classification and the individuality that escapes it.^*13 In A Young Man Gathering Shopping Carts, Huntington, New York, labor and commercial space function as signs that describe the young man, while his expression and stance leave room beyond that account.^*9 Sternfeld’s environmental portraits make the classificatory impulse of looking part of the frame and show what remains outside its reach.

New Color and New Topographics

Sternfeld brought together the contingency of street photography, the restrained distance of New Topographics, and the color structures of New Color. Kevin Moore, quoted in the artist’s official biography, has described his work as an integration of street photography’s humor and social insight, observation of the man-altered landscape, and the formal concerns of late-1970s color photography.^*12 William Eggleston made everyday color an autonomous photographic subject, and Stephen Shore described the visual order of roads and buildings. Sternfeld connected color to time accumulated in the land. The hues of seasons, building materials, advertisements, cars, and vegetation carry layers of development, consumption, disaster, and memory at once. By sustaining beauty and political unease within the same landscapes, his work extended color photography from a means of reproducing the world’s vividness into a critical method for reading social change over time.

Photobooks and Writing: From Image to Sequence

Sternfeld constructs time beyond a single frame through the sequence of the photobook and through writing. In American Prospects, photographs from different regions and seasons make suburban development, disasters, labor, leisure, and remnants of wilderness legible as recurring signs across the United States. Steidl’s revised edition added portraits and clarified the book’s continuity with Stranger Passing, revealing the long development through which Sternfeld treated landscape and portraiture as aspects of the same relation between people and place.^*10 In On This Site, the temporal gap between the present conveyed by the image and the past conveyed by writing becomes the work’s central device. The official biography explains that his later photobooks expand their narrative possibilities through the artist’s own texts and form an interconnected body of series that respond to one another.^*12 Through the sequence, readers move among histories beyond the frame, structures repeated in other places, and the limits of what photographs can know.

Sweet Earth and Oxbow Archive

While photographing On This Site, Sternfeld also began visiting idealistic communities alongside sites of violence. He rejected an early plan to balance violence and utopia within one volume, concentrated On This Site on the memory of violence, and continued photographing communities as a separate series. Against a period in which large-scale urbanization and market principles gained momentum after the collapse of the Soviet system, Sweet Earth records religious communities, communes, ecovillages, and other models for organizing life collectively through photographs and text.^*14 For Oxbow Archive, begun in 2006, Sternfeld returned to the Massachusetts fields Thomas Cole painted in the 1830s and walked them almost daily for a year and a half. He had also photographed the land in 1978; the later series follows it through the seasons as a place now marked by an interstate highway and the effects of climate change.^*15 These works move Sternfeld’s landscapes from observing contradictions in American society toward political and environmental questions about how people live, use land, and choose a future. Color and season became the forms needed to show how those choices enter the time of nature.