Corrupting Photography
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.
In 1974, while looking at the work of William Eggleston, a photographer who had introduced rich, saturated color into the black-and-white street tradition, Sternfeld had one of those flashes of insight that may come only a few times in a career; he suddenly realized that Eggleston was the pinnacle of this direction, that the lineage begun by Cartier-Bresson and Evans had reached its logical conclusion in Eggleston's powerful photographs of the American South.
Indeed, the street photograph was so well-established by the time Sternfeld came on the scene that it had been codified and assimilated by the art world in general. In the early 1960s, a number of artists appeared who, although not photographers, nevertheless used photography in much of their work. William Christenberry, Dan Graham, and Ed Ruscha, among others, used the vocabulary of Evans and Frank to take the documentary aspects of photography to a more radical dimension. Christenberry's color photographs of vernacular Alabama architecture shot with a cheap Brownie camera, Graham's purposefully amateurish color snapshots of American homes published in Arts Magazine (1966), and Ruscha's seemingly artless, deadpan books, such as Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963), reveal a new photographic approach that utilized the matter-of-fact nature of the snapshot, often creating a series of "visual lists." For these artists, the way to create photographic art was to completely ignore the desire among the photographic community for the aesthetic image and pristine, high-contrast print; instead, they used the medium as a recording tool and scientific instrument.
In the 1960s, these novel applications of photography began to open the medium up to new possibilities of amalgamation. If Sternfeld's future did not lie in a reductive reportage approach, the use of photography by the art community nevertheless demonstrated the possibilities inherent in thinking about the medium more broadly and less strictly in photographic terms. Sternfeld chose to expand photography, corrupting its purity by injecting it with elements from other media. If photography was going to move forward, it would have to travel beyond the photographic community into the art world in general, yet be more than a conceptual snapshot and replay of Evans or Frank. It was going to have to compete with painting.
Color played a key role in Sternfeld's enterprise to ratchet up photography to achieve the resonance of painting. To a degree, the groundwork for such an approach had been laid in the early and mid-1970s, when the use of color by Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, and Helen Levitt presented a fundamental break with the black-and-white conventions that still dominated the photographic scene. Like them, Sternfeld worked in color, but he was beginning to establish a more structured approach by limiting his palette to two or three hues of similar density. He was also inspired by the New Topographic photographers such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, who, despite still working in black-and-white, had introduced elements of cool distance and simplified composition in their images of suburban development and industrial parks.
Having received a Guggenheim Fellowship based on his street photography, Sternfeld began touring America in 1978. He gave up his first handheld Leica and began lugging around a bulky 8 x 10 view camera—the same equipment that 19th-century photographers had used. The large-format camera slowed the entire photographic process down, making it more closely resemble the act of painting. Rather than roaming the country looking for that spontaneous, chance encounter in the manner of Cartier-Bresson, Sternfeld now chose his subjects with great care, determining the composition in advance, and working out the details in the extensive setup time.
Sternfeld shifted away from the city toward the landscape, yet wanted to retain the social and humanitarian overtones found so readily in street photography. He began to look back at work from masters of painting, particularly the "world paintings" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Bruegel depicted landscapes from a distant bird's-eye view that fused the foreground and the background in one continuous map-like sequence. From this celestial perspective, the viewer sees many places simultaneously, grasping man's precarious place in a world that might still harbor demons and devils in nearby forests. As Simon Schama has argued, from "this Olympian vision... it was possible, from the heights, to grasp the underlying unities of nature in a way denied by the close-up inspection of incompatible details."
Sternfeld aspired to "paint" a larger canvas or worldview that brought together figure, landscape, and narrative into one master frame that slowly reveals its secrets. His goal was to create a contemplative and slow viewing experience without returning to late 19th-century photographers' mimicry of painting techniques with such "special effects" as diffused lighting or silhouetted imagery. He wanted to detect man's place within the complex contemporary world, to reinvent the landscape with a sense of narrative, to offer vistas prepped with myriad details rendered in crystal clarity that, like much of traditional landscape painting, leave the viewer with a mystery yet to unravel. Bruegel, as well as other painters ranging from the Limbourg brothers to Jacob van Ruisdael, used compositional and perspectival methods to bring the macrocosm into the microcosm, to examine man's relationship to both tamed and untamed nature; their work offered Sternfeld a way of thinking about photography's ability to create landscape imagery embedded with meaning.
In a 1983 photograph taken in Atlanta, Sternfeld gives us an idyllic modern-day Eden. Well-manicured lawns stretch out and recede into the distance, following the gentle curves of the narrow roadway. Clusters of trees give the impression of a forest, albeit one controlled by a landscape architect. Barely visible behind the trees are dwellings that are underscale versions of their manor house ancestors; in the foreground stand three figures.
Although Sternfeld's photograph is of an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood somewhere on the periphery of Atlanta, this scene could just as easily be a movie studio back lot where Leave It to Beaver was filmed. Upon close inspection, however, the viewer is confronted with his own misassumption: the three people are not the white residents who reside in this pastoral community; they are, in fact, domestic workers waiting for a bus that will drive them out of this paradise. Like the courtly inhabitants of the illuminated manuscripts of the Limbourg brothers, the trio stands amidst a cultivated and controlled garden; unlike the historical figures, these workers have no relationship to the garden. By backing off from the scene, placing equal emphasis on each element in the composition, and allowing the viewer to carefully stitch them together, Sternfeld is able to comment on aspects of the contemporary American condition in which false fronts open up to reveal the other realities that lie behind them.
Sternfeld's manipulation of photography—his corruption of its traditions—seems to go hand-in-hand with the corruption of America. His new, panoramic approach was poised to reveal a kind of noir side to the exaggerated daylight of contemporary culture's theme park mentality. This desire to tame the wilderness, to remake and possess it (and ultimately construct a fiction out of it), is not just American, for all gardens are to an extent vehicles for transformation. The early Moorish gardens of Spain and medieval European gardens were meant to suggest paradise, while 18th- and 19th-century picturesque gardens of England and Germany, such as Stowe, Stourhead, or Wilhelmshöhe Park, with their perfectly fabricated temple, pavilion, and grotto "ruins," transport the visitor from one country and time to another. But America, even more than Europe, has embraced this simulation; it has gone further by extending the notion of a garden or amusement park beyond its physical borders and into daily life itself. From Coney Island's Luna Park, which opened in 1906, to Disneyland and Universal City, American theme parks not only send visitors reeling backward in time, but forward into the various "Tomorrowland" utopias in which we live today.
Sternfeld's American Prospects addresses America's desire to live in an imaginary paradise rather than the real world. The blind man standing like Homer amid his blooming flora in his Homer, Alaska, garden could be a metaphor for America itself, unable to see the splendors that surround it. A view of Matanuska Glacier in the same state suggests that even in these remote parts of the country, a majestic view must inevitably turn into a real estate development. A man sitting in his Jacuzzi in the backyard of his Beverly Hills home strikes us as Adam himself in the Garden of Eden (the Southern California hillside), surrounded by the snake (a garden hose), the forbidden fruit (a lemon bush), and Eve (the camera itself, and thus the viewer). Paradise extends into the new suburban developments all around America, from Lake Oswego in Oregon, with its unobtrusive, oh-so-refined monochromatic matching duplex and white basketball hoops, to Tucson, an artificial oasis powered by solar pool petals that has erupted in the desert, to the orange groves in the back of a Studio City tract house with its very own punk Adam and Eve.
Nearly all of these Arcadians have flip sides, turbulent undercurrents of impending doom that offer dark foils to Thomas Cole's sublime views of the 19th-century American wilderness. Two girls swimming in the Swift River in New Hampshire are about to be enveloped by the foreboding gloom of river and trees, while the happy patrons of an aquatic theme park in Orlando relish the manmade fury of the pool waves, oblivious to the approaching storm and nature's real wrath. A father and daughter are captured in a new housing development replete with manicured lawns, flower beds, and concrete driveways in Southern California's Canyon Country; they appear satisfied with their triumph over the arid hills of Southern California and yet they also seem stiff and tense, as if at any moment their paradise might slip away. And indeed it just has, literally, in nearby Rancho Mirage, where a concrete driveway and a car have collapsed into a ravine during a flash flood.
Sternfeld's willingness to open photography to the possibilities of painting also unlocked the door to influences from other media, particularly the cinema. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, American filmmakers such as Robert Altman (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye), Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven), Mike Nichols (The Graduate), and Arthur Penn (Bonnie & Clyde, Little Big Man, Night Moves) created an American version of the French New Wave, depicting a corrupt and violent culture closely intertwined with its environment. These films clearly influenced Sternfeld's work, both in their attempts to link disturbing narratives with rural towns and suburbs, and in their style—often dominated by panoramic vistas that recall classic Westerns, and rendered in muted colors and natural light by talented cinematographers such as Néstor Almendros. The films foreshadow Sternfeld's disband perspectives, flat lighting, and limited color palette.
Just as Sternfeld benefited from these films at the moment when the decision between photography and cinematography became blurred, a more recent crop of filmmakers has in turn profited from Sternfeld's photographs of the late 1970s and early 1980s. David Byrne's True Stories (1986), Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999), David Lynch's Blue Velvet(1986) and Wild at Heart (1990), Sam Mendes' American Beauty (1999), and Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984), among others, find a quagmire of sickness and violence lying right behind the false utopian façades of America's rural and suburban streets. They evoke—more overtly than Sternfeld's pictures—the pent-up tensions at the base of the American spine.
If the contamination of paradise has often been Sternfeld's subject, he has likewise tainted the purity of photography in order to capture the condition of America. His shift from spontaneous snapshot to predetermined picture-making helped open the gates for a new type of photography now practiced by Gregory Crewdson, Rineke Dijkstra, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, and Jeff Wall, among many others. Since the publication of American Prospects, photography has largely displaced painting; energized by increased scale, luminosity, color, detail, and narrative implications, it is arguably the most vital form in contemporary art. By corrupting the purity of photography, Sternfeld played a pivotal role in moving the medium forward.