CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/12/2015

Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects

"Great Salt Lake, Utah, August 1979" is reproduced from Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects, one of the great American photobooks of the 1980s. Featured in The National Gallery of Art's Photobooks After Frank exhibition, it speaks of "a time when progress lost its sense of inevitability, when the land lost its last pretense to innocence, when the spirit of individualism flickered for want of fresh air," according to essayist Andy Grundberg. The photographs "also speak of nature's restorative powers, of human goodness, of men and women seeking to accommodate their primal needs to the imperatives of technological society. It is a tricky business, balancing these messages, and it does not make for ideological simplicity or political instrumentality. However, in these photographs Sternfeld manages to eke a measure of harmony out of an assortment of follies, which makes American Prospects a metonym for the state of our times."