Writings | American Prospects

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?

First published in 1987 to great acclaim, American Prospects changed the course of photographic representation. Its present reprinting allows for a deeper look into the surprising ways Joel Sternfeld's images reinterpret the tradition of landscape depiction.

Sternfeld made the first of these photographs in 1978, when color photography was still in its infancy as a fine art medium. Therefore, when he set out to navigate America's challenging landscape, the images it held were, to a considerable extent, unexplored. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his urban street photography, Sternfeld felt the force of larger artistic concerns driving him beyond the confines of the city street. As he writes in his Guggenheim report, it was the urge "of someone who grew up with a vision of classical regional America and the order it seemed to contain, to find beauty and harmony in an increasingly uniform, technological, and disturbing America."

The search for this harmony entailed the forging of an entirely new voice in photographic art, and a novel use of its materials. For American Prospects, Sternfeld used an 8x10 view camera to render detail as precise as that of Carlton Watkins or Walker Evans. He experimented with the application to photography of color theories conceived originally in reference to painting or architecture. And he made ironic the centuries-old tradition of landscape painting to call forth a new, modern conception of landscape. Moving high up and back from their subjects, Sternfeld's photographs present the contingencies of human and natural event in the form of narrative tableaux.

America's beauty, as Sternfeld conceived it, is complex and transcendent as much as it is troubled and uneasy. It is not the dark, disaffected country traveled by Robert Frank, nor the sublime beauty of Ansel Adams' untouched wilderness, not the dispassionate landscape of the New Topographic photographers. While Sternfeld's vision surely owes allegiance to all of these perspectives, it is yet equivalent to none. Sternfeld's America is most analogous to that of Walker Evans 40 years earlier. Yet where Evans saw a physically crumbling but spiritually intact nation, Sternfeld finds a world of shimmering new construction surrounding a human spirit in serious trouble.

Joel Sternfeld's 1979 photograph made in Woodland, Washington, seems at first to be merely a country road sweeping through a rather nondescript landscape. Then you are pulled further in through the images of a parked sheriff's car and bystanders down the road, staring at some kind of activity; there, at the point where the road stripes and telephone lines converge in a demonstration of Renaissance perspective, lies a wet gray-brown mass—an elephant that has collapsed on the highway. Seen at a distance, the runaway beast, which could seem so incongruous or even surreal in this context, becomes merely one element of the overall scene, one prospect among many. The landscape, spotted with sheds, weeds, and rather ragged pine trees, seems as drained of energy and miserable as the elephant, its Edenic beauty spoiled by encroaching development.

Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington, June 1979 first appeared in Joel Sternfeld's landmark photographic book American Prospects. Revealing much about the contemporary landscape and the American psyche both then and now, the 1987 publication depicts an exhausted garden ruined by unchecked growth, where troubling situations are camouflaged as the norm—a place unable to escape its own circus-like behavior. Throughout the book, America lies collapsed in the middle of the road it cannot stop building.

However, as American photography from Carlton Watkins to Ansel Adams is inextricably bound with the landscape, American Prospects is a book not just about the country's complex and troubled relationship to nature, but about photography itself. Its publication was in part a response to a dilemma facing many photographers in the 1970s who found themselves, like Sternfeld's elephant, exhausted on a highway looking for a way forward.

Most of the significant photographers working in the early 1970s were still operating within the established vocabulary of the street picture, a genre that had been mastered and refined in the first half of the twentieth century by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Walker Evans. In the postwar era, particularly in America, the street photograph had been given a cynical, gritty edge by Robert Frank, William Klein, and Garry Winogrand, among others, who introduced a sense of hostile voyeurism and shoot-from-the-hip quickness into Cartier-Bresson's search for the "decisive moment." Despite the wide range of this street work, these artists were united in their rejection of references to the conventions of painting and art history, preferring instead to underscore the attributes of the handheld 35mm Leica camera, including speed, action, grain, blur, and purposefully off-kilter compositions that caught the disorder of modern life in direct, documentary fashion.

By the title American Prospects, Joel Sternfeld might be referring both to America's future and to its commanding views. Looking out might be both physical and mental, phenomenological and psychological. Eschewing both the heart of large cities and America's remaining wilderness, Sternfeld concentrates instead on the juncture of the two, where man has altered the land for purposes of domesticity, agriculture, industry, or pleasure. Sternfeld focuses on man as the earth's caretaker. In that role, modern man has been preserver, decorator, transient, controller, spoiler, and imitator-with both success and disaster.

Equally important, these are American landscapes. They are specifically of Troy, New York; Bear Lake, Utah; Beverly Hills, California; Houston, Texas; and Century Village, Florida. While many of the issues Sternfeld addresses are also relevant to other Western cultures, his titles remind viewers that these images are made in America and maybe perceived in the cultural and historical context of this nation. Sternfeld has studied the industries, seasons, geology, and vegetation natural to each region. He has read American literature attentively for details of regional life. His photographs record abandoned mills and river towns in New England, military bases and retirees in the South, ranchers and dude-ranch riders in the West, and colonial homes with dogwood trees in the Southeast.

Why is there such an urge to encompass America—at least that part of the North American continent that is the United States? Why this drive to swallow the country whole-- to know it as one knows a lover, to reveal its innermost essence—when it was born of many parts, a federation of different states place and mind? Perhaps it is the vastness of the undertaking that draws us in, the immensity of the task. Perhaps it is the ineffability of this country, its significance so great that it invites description even while it defies it. Or perhaps it is because America is really a mirror, and in the process of describing it we cannot help but describe ourselves. If this is the case, what is at issue in books about America is not just the quality of observation, but the construction of history.

When Tocqueville disembarked in New York in May 1831, he was by no means the first foreigner to come to America seeking to discern its meaning through direct observation. He was merely more perceptive than his predecessors, and in the nine months that he and his companion, Gustave de Beaumont, journeyed across the breadth of the adolescent United States, he observed its character and prospects with an uncanny prescience. So keen, detailed, and balanced is his report, ambitiously titled Democracy in America, that it seems at times almost photographic.

Photography, of course, was yet to be born, so we have no snapshots by Tocqueville to compare his view with what we, more than 150 years later, can record today. But we know that from the moment he set foot in this country, the young French noble man was made aware that in America things are not what they seem: