American Prospects
Description
Joel Sternfeld travelled the country for around eight years with a 8x10 view camera and colour film, a sojourn that produced his first and best-known book, American Prospects... The particular quality brought by Sternfeld to the 8x10 colour-landscape aesthetic... is a clear sense of narrative... In American Prospects, each picture suggests an arcane drama being played out—an elephant stranded on a road in Oregon, or a pumpkin stall in Virginia behind which a house burns fiercely. These narrative hints are suggestive, sly, often ironic, frequently mysterious, making American Prospects less a series of photographs than a series of tales—unfinished, elliptical certainly—that add up to a cogent and persuasive view of America...
Books
American Prospects
Specifications
Writings
Color Interaction and the Color Photograph
When I began photographing in the late 1960s, within the first month, I knew I had to work in color. I believed that color was necessary to render the seasonal and atmospheric effects that had impelled me to photograph in the first place fig. 2.
I did not make this decision idly: I had carefully photographed several scenes in the landscape in color and then in black-and-white, printed them, and compared the results.
Over the years, I have come to believe that my decision was not necessarily correct: Many photographs made in “black and white” by Robert Adams stir me viscerally fig. 3. I believe the difference lies in the ability of black and white to render fractional gradations of light. [1]
But the decision was made, and then I faced a problem I’ve yet to fully answer for myself: what are the aesthetic principles of the photograph in color, its highest and its most powerful uses?