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In this sobering collection of photographs, Joel Sternfeld looks at fifty places where violence has stained the American landscape. Arriving long after news photographers have gone, he presents us with the landscape that is left behind, the ordinary site that remains after the tragedy. Free of the sensationalism of contemporary reporting, these unadorned images, and the brief text that accompanies them, have a surprising power, allowing us to contemplate the meaning of what has taken place, and what has been lost. In this work, one of the most acclaimed photographers of our time extends the documentary tradition, finding a way to visualize our beleaguered national sense, shaken by decades of violence. This groundbreaking work asks that we broaden our conventional definition of violence to include the consequences of corporate irresponsibility and governmental indifference. These picture stand as a heartfelt memorial. They mark sites that have become an indelible part of the American landscape. They ask us to stand on that difficult threshold between what has happened and what little remains; between what we know and what cannot be understood. This, too, is the American landscape.
The successful photographer shares his idiosyncratic vision of life in America by combining his evocative images with the musings of two great writers.
The definitive edition of Joel Sternfeld's seminal American Prospects, featuring new photographs, and a revised format and cover 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 c...
This is the first book of Sternfeld's largely unseen early colour photographs. In 1969 Sternfeld began working with a 35 mm camera and Kodachrome film, and First Pictures contains works from this time until 1980. Here Sternfeld develops traits that appear in his mature work: irony, a politicised view of America, concern for the social condition. But there are also pictures that bear little relation to his later work: colour arrangements that parallel those of Eggleston, as well as street photography which Sternfeld ceased making in 1976. The photographs in First Pictures were made at a time when colour photography was struggling to assert itself against the authoritative black and white tradition, making this book a revelation both in Sternfeld's oeuvre and in the history of contemporary photography.
Joel Sternfeld went to Montreal in 2005 to photograph the participants in the eleventh United Nations conference on climate change. The resulting 53 colour portraits of participants at the conference form the heart of this book.
On a summer morning in 1833, Thomas Cole, a British-born, American landscape painter climbed to the top of Mount Holyoke in central Massachusetts and made a sketch of the Connecticut River where it bends and resembles an ox yoke. Three years later the sketch he made that morning became View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow). The four by six foot painting, now a key work of American art has been described as Coles attempt to create a moving time/space panorama within a single frame the passage of time is represented by the ongoing fury of the storm on the mountain as sunshine returns to the meadow below. Cole was skeptical about progress and the ...
In the early morning of 14 April 2018, David Buckel walked into Prospect Park in New York City 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, as the head of composting. He was married to a man with whom he, and a married lesbian couple, were co-raising a college-bound daughter.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 b...
In 2003, Frank Gohlke and Joel Sternfeld were commissioned to photograph one of the densest concentrations of ethnic diversity in the world, the borough of Queens in New York City. After more than a year of photographing everything from corner bodegas to the borough's boundaries, Gohlke and Sternfeld had not only captured the complicated dy - namic that sustains Queens and its myriad communities; they had also evolved a unique theory of landscape photography in which landscape is a visible manifestation of the invisible emotions of its inhabitants. The collection inherits the strength of each photographer's eye. Gohlke's Queens consists of streets, houses, fences, gardens, parklands, shoreli...
In his 1992 book Campagna Romana. The Countryside of Ancient Rome Joel Sternfeld focused on the ruins of grand structures with a clear warning: great civilizations fall, ours may too. Now in Rome after Rome, containing images from the previous book as well as numerous unpublished pictures, Sternfeld's questions multiply: who are these modern Romans? What is their relationship to the splendor that was? What is the nature of sullied modernity in relation to the Arcadian ideal? Is there, at this late moment, any chance for Utopia? The Campagna, the countryside south and east of Rome occupies a special place in Roman--and human history. With the rise of Ancient Rome, this once polluted, malarial...
The definitive edition of Joel Sternfeld's seminal American Prospects, featuring new photographs, and a revised format and cover 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 c...