CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/28/2020

A new, expanded edition of Joel Sternfeld's seminal 'American Prospects'

Featured image, captioned "South Texas, January 1983," is reproduced from Steidl's new and expanded edition of Joel Sternfeld's influential 1987 photography book, American Prospects—now featuring a dozen new and mostly unpublished images. "In the future, no doubt, these images will seem suffused with nostalgia, much as we now see Walker Evans's photographs of the 1930s," Andy Grundberg wrote in the first edition. "They will seem less ironic and more totemic, and their sometimes acid social commentary will lose much of its bite. But for now they speak 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. They also speak of nature's restorative powers, of human goodness, of men and women seeking to accommodate their primal needs to the imperative of technological society. It is 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."