Joel Sternfeld (American, b. 1944) is an artist and photographer who has worked in colour since 1970, using a large-format camera.,,His work, steeped in history and landscape, concerns the utopian and dystopian possibilities of American life.He often adds written text to his photographs to widen the narrative possibilities of still images.,
Sternfeld made his first body of work, First Pictures, between 1971 and 1976. For it he approached people in streets, public squares, bars and restaurants, placing himself in the tradition of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.He then travelled across the United States on trips between 1977 and 1988, photographing with a 10×8 camera.The resulting book, American Prospects, was published in 1987, and two Guggenheim Fellowships in 1978 and 1982 supported the project. It includes a photograph of a firefighter buying pumpkins at a farm stand while a house burns behind him.,Sternfeld has said that, although there is humour in the work, it was for him “a deeply serious and political enterprise”.
In On This Site (1996), he photographed places where crimes had occurred and added explanatory texts to the images.,Walking the High Line (2001) documents a defunct elevated railway in New York.His site-specific work has also been presented by High Line Art, the public art program of the High Line park in New York.With Donna Wingate he created the Precipice Alliance, an organisation that commissioned large-scale works on pressing issues such as global warming.Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America looks at alternative ways of living.In 1989 he received the Prix de Rome, which let him photograph the Roman Campagna for a year.He also curated the exhibition “Landscapes After Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime” at the Grey Art Gallery in New York.
The designer Stuart Vevers based his first Coach collection on American Prospects, using a Sternfeld photograph as the runway backdrop.In 2022 an online exhibition, “American Prospects: The New Pictures”, showed previously unseen images from the series that were found in boxes in his studio.His photography books have been published by the German publisher Steidl.,The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago hold his photographs.,The photographer Aaron Huey has named him among the masters whose influence is hard to escape when photographing the American West.
