Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld’s History in Pictures offers a space in which human history and what it means to be human in the world now may be considered. Using unaltered photographs and texts that look behind and around the images, Sternfeld (born 1944) speculates on representative moments and sites to create a portal to what will be on the other side if our course goes unaltered.

Sternfeld’s pictures often puzzle with notions of Westernization, globalization and identity, such as a young man in rural Peru selling a hot dog on a croissant with evident discomfiture, a girl role-playing as a French maid in a club in Japan, a wax figure of Kim Kardashian at Madame Tussauds and Rocko Gieselman, the first University of Vermont student to register an undefined gender. Modernism, contradiction, inequality, hate, technology, high science and emergent sexual identities have reshaped human existence forever.

History in Pictures allows a view back onto ourselves at a time when things are changing so quickly.

In the summer of 1975, facing surgery with the potential of paralysis, a young Joel Sternfeld went off in search of a last idyll—and found it in Nags Head, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. From June to August he captured the beach town floating in time, a sense of spatial and temporal fluidity. Sternfeld’s images show beachgoers of all ages enjoying scenes of leisure and partying in what became his first body of work addressing a season.
Yet this summer sojourn was tragically broken by the news of the death of his brother; Sternfeld returned to New York, never to go back to Nags Head. Eventually he began working again and one day ventured to Rockaway Beach, Queens. Here he took a picture in which “all at once the ugly scene appeared beautiful to me”: the hues of sand, apartments and sky fuse into a cohesive whole. This photo, with its conceptual roots in Nags Head, would lead to the color structures of Sternfeld’s magnum opus American Prospects, his ambitious realization of what he had always wanted to do: follow the seasons across America.
A major figure in the photography world for nearly five decades, 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 holds the Nobel Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College.

With nine additional photos, a larger format and an expanded, up-to-date timeline, this is the new and revised edition of Joel Sternfeld’s Walking the High Line, which documents the overgrown elevated freight rail line above New York’s West Side before it was transformed into the cherished High Line public park in 2009.

In the dark days following the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001, Joel Sternfeld came to Gerhard Steidl with the hope of quickly making a book. For the previous two years Sternfeld had been photographing the abandoned railroad and working with a group, the Friends of the High Line, that wanted to save it and turn it into a park. Powerful real estate and political interests seeking to tear it down and commercially develop the land beneath it were using the chaos of the period to rush forward their plans. Steidl agreed—six weeks later there were finished books in New York. It was a small volume but it played a crucial role in allowing New Yorkers to see for the first time the beauty of a secret railroad in all the seasons.

Like the photographs made by William Henry Jackson in the 1870s of Yellowstone that led Congress to establish a national park, the pictures proved pivotal in the making of the High Line’s reputation.

Born of a desire to follow the seasons up and down America, and equally to find lyricism in contemporary American life despite all its dark histories, American Prospects has enjoyed a life of acclaim. Its pages are filled with unexpected excitement, despair, tenderness and hope. Its fears are expressed in beauty, its sadnesses in irony. Oddly enough, the society it seems to presage has now come to be; the ideas of this book bespeak our present moment.
Often out of print, this new edition of Joel Sternfeld’s seminal book returns to the format of the original 1987 edition. All of the now classic images within it—alongside a group of never published photographs—examine a once pristine land safeguarded by Indigenous peoples who needed no lessons in stewardship, and a land now occupied by a mix of peoples hoping for salvation within the fraught paths of late capitalism. The result suggests a vast nation whose prospects have much to do with global prospects, a “teenager of the world” unaware of its strengths, filled with idealism and frequent failings. These pictures see all but judge not.
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 holds the Nobel Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College. His books published by Steidl include American Prospects (2003), Sweet Earth (2006), Oxbow Archive (2008), First Pictures (2012), Landscape as Longing (2016) with Frank Gohlke, Rome after Rome (2019) and Our Loss (2019).

First published in 1987 to critical acclaim, the seminal American Prospects has been likened to Walker Evans’ American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans in both its ability to visually summarize the zeitgeist of a decade and to influence the course of photography following its publication.

This definitive edition of American Prospects contains 12 new pictures, most of which have neither been published nor exhibited. Freed from the size constraints of previous editions, Sternfeld includes portraits and portraits in the landscape that elucidate the human condition in America. The result is a more complex and rounded view of American society that strongly anticipates Sternfeld’s Stranger Passing series (1985–2000) and links the two bodies of work.

A major figure in the photography world, 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 books published by Steidl include American Prospects (2003), Sweet Earth (2006), Oxbow Archive (2008), First Pictures (2012) and Landscape as Longing (2016) with Frank Gohlke.

In the early morning of 14 April 2018, David Buckel walked into Prospect Park in Brooklyn and set himself alight. He was a distinguished attorney whose work to secure social justice and LGBT rights had won national acclaim. At the time of his death at the age of 60 Buckel had left the practice of law and was working on a community farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

In an email sent to the New York Times moments before his death, Buckel decried the increasing pollution of the earth. He expressed the hope that his death by fossil fuels would encourage others to be better stewards of the earth. Joel Sternfeld happened to be in Prospect Park on that day with his nine-year-old son. Returning the next day, he began to document the gradual regeneration of the site as a means to honor the hope that climate change might be reversed. Our Loss is the latest book by Sternfeld on the effects of climate change, following Oxbow Archive (2008) and When It Changed (2008).