Jacket Copy for 2003 Edition of American Prospects

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.

American Prospects- and all of Sternfeld's subsequent work- is one profound meditation on a perennial postmodern question: Have the chances for Utopia been lost? More than anything else, it is Sternfeld's skeptical, trenchant, and loving depiction of the schism in contemporary consciousness that has permitted photographic practice to move forward as it has since the pivotal American Prospects.