Joel Sternfeld

Last updated
Joel Sternfeld
Born (1944-06-30) June 30, 1944 (age 79)
Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Alma materDartmouth College
Known for Photography
Notable work
  • American Prospects (1987)
  • Walking the High Line (2001)
Website www.joelsternfeld.net/artworks

Joel Sternfeld (born June 30, 1944) [1] is an American fine-art photographer. He is best known for his large-format color pictures of contemporary American life and identity. His work contributed to the establishment of color photography as a respected artistic medium. [2] [3] [4] Furthering the tradition of roadside photography started by Walker Evans in the 1930s, Sternfeld documents people and places with unexpected excitement, despair, tenderness, and hope. Ever since the 1987 publication of his landmark “American Prospects,” Sternfeld’s work has interwoven the conceptual and political, while being steeped in history, landscape theory and his passion for the passage of the seasons. Sternfeld’s is a beautiful and sad portrait of America - ironic, lyrical, unfinished, seeing without judging.

Contents

Life and work

Sternfeld earned a BA from Dartmouth College. He began taking color photographs in 1970 after learning the color theory of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. Color is an important element of his photographs.

He is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and spent a year in Italy on a Rome Prize. He currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, where he holds the Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History. Sternfeld's work is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among many other notable institutions listed in the "Collections" section.

First Pictures (1969-1976)

Sternfeld initially started taking pictures in 1969 with a 35mm camera and Kodachrome slide film. These pictures mark the beginning of Sternfeld’s interest in documenting the American condition. The pictures are an insight into the development of his color arrangements which eventually resulted in a new language for color photography most notable in American Prospects. Sternfeld, in addition to other colorists like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore were crucial pioneers in the medium. [5] This body of work was first published in 2012 by Steidl publishing house.

American Prospects (1978-1984)

American Prospects, (first published in 1987, most recently published in 2012) is Sternfeld's most known book and explores the complexity of human-altered landscapes in the United States. He began it in 1978, when color photography was still in its infancy as an art medium. Using a large-format camera, his photographs harken back to the traditions of 19th century photography, yet are applied to everyday scenes, like a Wet n' Wild waterpark, or a suburban street in the South. [6] He captured the faltering "prospects" (both views and opportunities) of the time. Because of his early street work, Sternfeld was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which funded his initial tour of the states. The American Prospects photos are of people, buildings, and mostly landscapes from the multiple trips Sternfeld took between 1978 and 1984. [7]

Campagna Romana: The Countryside of Ancient Rome

Campagna Romana was initially published in 1992 by Knopf publishing house. After being awarded the Rome Prize fellowship, Sternfeld extensively photographed the countryside around Rome. The pictures document the interaction between the grand romantic ruins and the invasion of modernity. Several of the images are created to form panoramic images that sometime stretch over several images. This technique presents the sweeping vistas of the countryside while also setting up contrasts between the images within each piece. In one such work, a crumbling fragment of an ancient wall huddles forlornly in one frame of a four-panel piece, surrounded by the scaffolding-clad buildings of a new apartment complex. [8]

On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam

On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam (first published with Steidl in 1996), is a collection of pictures from famous crime sites in America. The eerily normal locations are seemingly remains left behind after tragedies, their hidden stories disturbingly invisible. Next to each photograph is text about the events that happened at that location. [9]

Hart Island a Potter's Field in New York City

From 1991 to 1994 Sternfeld worked with Melinda Hunt to document New York City's public cemetery on Hart Island, resulting in the book "Hart Island" (1998). [10]

Stranger Passing

Initially published by Bulfinch in 2001, and then by Steidl in 2012, Stranger Passing consists of a series of portraits that have roots in his initial project American Prospects. Over a period of fifteen years Joel Sternfeld travelled across America and took portrait photographs that form in Douglas R. Nickel’s words an “intelligent, unscientific, interpretive sampling of what Americans looked like at the century’s end.” Unlike historical portraits which represent significant people in staged surroundings, Sternfeld’s subjects are uncannily “normal”: a banker having an evening meal, a teenager collecting shopping carts in a parking lot, a homeless man holding his bedding.

Using August Sander’s classic photograph of three peasants on their way to a dance as a starting point, Sternfeld employed a conceptual strategy that amounts to a new theory of the portrait, which might be termed “The Circumstantial Portrait”. [11]

Exhibitions

Awards

Publications

Collections

Sternfeld's work is held in the following public collection:

Related Research Articles

Robert Frank was a Swiss American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ ... ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century." Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Meiselas</span> American photographer

Susan Meiselas is an American documentary photographer. She has been associated with Magnum Photos since 1976 and been a full member since 1980. Currently she is the President of the Magnum Foundation. She is best known for her 1970s photographs of war-torn Nicaragua and American carnival strippers.

William Eggleston is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium. Eggleston's books include William Eggleston's Guide (1976) and The Democratic Forest (1989).

Frank Gohlke is an American landscape photographer. He has been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Scholar Grant. His work is included in numerous permanent collections, including those of Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tina Barney is an American photographer best known for her large-scale, color portraits of her family and close friends in New York and New England. She is a member of the Lehman family.

Guy Bourdin, was a French artist and fashion photographer known for his highly stylized and provocative images. From 1955, Bourdin worked mostly with Vogue as well as other publications including Harper's Bazaar. He shot ad campaigns for Chanel, Charles Jourdan, Pentax and Bloomingdale's.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Shore</span> American photographer

Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his images of scenes and objects of the banal, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Graham (photographer)</span> English photographer

Paul Graham is a British fine-art and documentary photographer. He has published three survey monographs, along with 17 other publications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Wessel Jr.</span> American photographer and educator (1942–2018)

Henry Wessel was an American photographer and educator. He made "obdurately spare and often wry black-and-white pictures of vernacular scenes in the American West".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruce Davidson (photographer)</span> American photographer

Bruce Landon Davidson is an American photographer. He has been a member of the Magnum Photos agency since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, New York City, have been widely exhibited and published. He is known for photographing communities that are usually hostile to outsiders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alec Soth</span> American photographer

Alec Soth is an American photographer, based in Minneapolis. Soth makes "large-scale American projects" featuring the midwestern United States. New York Times art critic Hilarie M. Sheets wrote that he has made a "photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers" and photographs "loners and dreamers". His work tends to focus on the "off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America" according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth. He is a member of Magnum Photos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Burtynsky</span> Canadian photographer and artist

Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large format photographs of industrial landscapes. His works depict locations from around the world that represent the increasing development of industrialization and its impacts on nature and the human existence. It is most often connected to the philosophical concept of the sublime, a trait established by the grand scale of the work he creates, though they are equally disturbing in the way they reveal the context of rapid industrialization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mitch Epstein</span> American photographer

Mitchell Epstein is an American photographer. His books include Vietnam: A Book of Changes (1997); Family Business (2003), which won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award; Recreation: American Photographs 1973–1988 (2005); Mitch Epstein: Work (2006); American Power (2009); Berlin (2011); New York Arbor (2013); Rocks and Clouds (2018); Sunshine Hotel (2019); In India (2021); and Property Rights (2021).

Jim Goldberg is an American artist and photographer, whose work reflects long-term, in-depth collaborations with neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donovan Wylie</span>

Donovan Wylie is a Northern Irish photographer, based in Belfast. His work chronicles what he calls "the concept of vision as power in the architecture of contemporary conflict" – prison, army watchtowers and outposts, and listening stations – "merging documentary and art photography".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arnold Odermatt</span> Swiss police photographer (1925–2021)

Arnold Odermatt was a Swiss police photographer whose work spanned more than 40 years. Originally trained as a baker, he was a photographer for the Nidwalden cantonal police from 1948 until his retirement in 1990. He is best known for his eerily beautiful black and white photographs of the aftermaths of motor vehicle accidents. Odermatt joined the police in 1948 and rose to become a lieutenant, chief of the transport police, and deputy chief inspector of the Nidwalden Police before he retired.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saul Leiter</span> American photographer and painter (1923–2013)

Saul Leiter was an American photographer and painter whose early work in the 1940s and 1950s was an important contribution to what came to be recognized as the New York school of photography.

Fazal Sheikh is an artist who uses photographs to document people living in displaced and marginalized communities around the world.

Leo Rubinfien is an American photographer and essayist who lives and works in New York City. Rubinfien first came to prominence as part of the circle of artist-photographers who investigated new color techniques and materials in the 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Artur Walther</span> German-American art collector

Artur Walther is a German-American art collector focused on exhibiting and publishing contemporary photography and video art. A graduate of Harvard Business School, Walther was a General Partner at Goldman Sachs until his retirement in 1994. He began collecting photography in the late 1990s and later established The Walther Collection, which is open to the public at its museum campus in Neu-Ulm, Germany and its Project Space in New York City.

References

  1. ↑ "Museum of Contemporary Photography". www.mocp.org. Retrieved 2019-06-01.
  2. ↑ Jobey, Liz (17 October 2008). "In focus: Liz Jobey looks at the work of US photographer Joel Sternfeld". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2019-06-01– via www.theguardian.com.
  3. ↑ O'Hagan, Sean (11 January 2017). "The drifter: Joel Sternfeld on his sly glimpses of wild America – seen from the endless highway". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2019-06-01– via www.theguardian.com.
  4. ↑ O'Hagan, Sean (20 September 2011). "Joel Sternfeld's First Pictures: the opening chapter of a colourful career". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2019-06-01– via www.theguardian.com.
  5. ↑ "First Pictures - Joel Sternfeld". Steidl Verlag. Retrieved 2023-08-17.
  6. ↑ "Jacket Copy for 2003 Edition American Prospects". Joel Sternfeld. Retrieved 2022-08-26.
  7. ↑ Rainbow, Greta (2020-06-05). "Joel Sternfeld's American Prospects". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 2023-08-17.
  8. ↑ "Review/Photography; The Campagna Romana Viewed by Joel Sternfeld (Published 1991)". 1991-09-20. Retrieved 2023-08-17.
  9. ↑ "On This Site - Joel Sternfeld". Steidl Verlag. Retrieved 2023-08-17.
  10. ↑ Hunt, Melinda; Joel Sternfeld. Hart Island. ISBN   3-931141-90-X.
  11. ↑ "Stranger Passing - Joel Sternfeld". Steidl Verlag. Retrieved 2023-08-17.
  12. ↑ "Farbfotografien seit 1970". museum-folkwang.de. Retrieved 4 July 2014.
  13. ↑ "Exhibition: 'Joel Sternfeld – Color Photographs since 1970' at Foam, Amsterdam". Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam. Retrieved 4 July 2014.
  14. ↑ "Joel Sternfeld – Farbfotografien seit 1970". albertina.at. Retrieved 13 April 2017.
  15. ↑ "Photography Archives - Page 8 of 22". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 2022-08-26.
  16. ↑ Ivey, Bill; Princenthal, Nancy; Dowley, Jennifer (2001). Westbrook, Adele (ed.). A creative legacy: A history of the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists' Fellowship Program, 1966-1995. Abrams Books. ISBN   0810941708. LCCN   2001001355. OCLC   1042969410.
  17. ↑ "Photography Archives".
  18. ↑ "Joel Sternfeld". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 2019-06-01.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.