Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld's breakthrough project was the classic photobook American Prospects (1987), which established his lucid balancing of strong color, crisp detail and quiet irony. Sternfeld’s vision is that of “someone who grew up with a vision of classical regional America and the order it seemed to contain, to find beauty and harmony in an increasingly uniform, technological, and disturbing America.”

Joel Sternfeld was born in New York City in 1944. His photographs have been extensively exhibited, notably in Three Americans at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1984, and more recently in Stranger Passing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and On This Site at The Art Institute of Chicago. Sternfeld's published work includes Walking the High Line, a series of photographs of the abandoned elevated railway in Manhattan's Chelsea district, and Treading on Kings, photographs of protesters at the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy.

MONOGRAPHS & CATALOGS

Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects Text by Kerry Brougher, Andy Grundberg, Anne W. Tucker. First published in 1987, Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects is the classic photo record of 1980s America. This definitive edition, made with new plates and including one additional photograph, offers a spectacular,
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D.A.P./DISTRIBUTED ART PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9781935202974
$125.00 | In stock

Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects Essays by Kerry Brougher, Andy Grundberg and Anne W. Tucker. Originally published in 1987, Joel Sternfeld's now-classic view of America is here remastered, redesigned and reprinted at a larger, brighter, truer scale. Finally, photography and offset printing techniques have caught up
go to book page >>
D.A.P./DISTRIBUTED ART PUBLISHERS, INC.
ISBN: 9781891024771
$75.00 | Not available

Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects

Text by Kerry Brougher, Andy Grundberg, Anne W. Tucker.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers

First published in 1987, Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects is the classic photo record of 1980s America. This definitive edition, made with new plates and including one additional photograph, offers a spectacular, funny, sad and soberly riveting portrait of America’s diverse possibilities and prospects in the Reagan era. From the famous “Wet n’ Wild Aquatic Theme Park” in Florida to “The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Air Force Base” in San Antonio, Texas; from melancholy images of beached whales in Oregon to beautiful views of Yellowstone National Park and Bear Lake in Utah; from post-tornado Nebraska to a previously unseen photograph from the series, “Bikini Contest, Fort Lauderdale, FL, March 1983”; the sublime contradictions and tragicomedy of this volume are without doubt one of the greatest accomplishments of color photography, all the more fully realized in this splendid new edition. An essay by Kerry Brougher, Chief Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, considers the historical context of Sternfeld’s book and the pivotal role that American Prospects has played in the evolution of contemporary filmmaking and art photography.
A major exponent of color photography in America, Joel Sternfeld was born in New York City in 1944. He has received numerous awards including two Guggenheim fellowships, a Prix de Rome and the Citibank Photography Award. Sternfeld’s other books include On This Site (1997), Hart Island (1998), Stranger Passing (2001), Walking the High Line (2002), Sweet Earth (2006), When It Changed (2007), Oxbow Archive (2008) and First Pictures (2011).

Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects

Essays by Kerry Brougher, Andy Grundberg and Anne W. Tucker.
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.

Originally published in 1987, Joel Sternfeld's now-classic view of America is here remastered, redesigned and reprinted at a larger, brighter, truer scale. Finally, photography and offset printing techniques have caught up with Sternfeld's eye, and this new edition of American Prospects succeeds in presenting Sternfeld's most seminal work as it has always meant to be shown. A specially-commissioned essay by Kerry Brougher, Chief Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, considers the historical context in which Sternfeld was working and the pivotal role that American Prospects has played in the course of contemporary filmmaking and art photography. In American Prospects, a fireman shops for a pumpkin while a house burns in the background; a group of motorcyclists stop at the side of the road to take in a stunning, placid view of Bear Lake, Utah; the high-tech world headquarters of the Manville Corporation sits in picturesque Colorado, obscured by a defiant boulder; a lone basketball net stands in the desert near Lake Powell in Arizona; and a cookie-cutter suburban housing settlement rests squarely amongst rolling hills in Pendleton, Oregon. Sternfeld's photographic tour of America is a search for the truth of a country not just as it exists in a particular era but as it is in its ever-evolving essence. It is a sad poem, but also a funny and generous one, recognizing endurance, poignant beauty, and determination within its sometimes tense, often ironic juxtapositions of man and nature, technology and ruin.