Writings | At the Mall, New Jersey

Joel Sternfeld made the photographs in this book between 1971 and 1980. He exhibited and published select works in the late 1970s and early in the following decade, but to a certain extent these photographs are victims of their own success: they were the basis of Sternfeld’s successful 1978 Guggenheim Award application. He was awarded two Guggenheims in quick succession— the fist in 1978 and another in 1982— which allowed him to work on the nearly decade-long project titled American Prospects. That project culminated in 1987 with a book and exhibition that brought his work to wide public notice. American Prospects has long been understood as a landmark contribution to the history of American photography, but ironically its success eclipsed the photographs in this volume in the public record. They have languished in the studio in the intervening decades while Sternfeld focused on making new work. Between 2009 and the present however, he began looking again at early projects; in that process he rediscovered these photographs, which now look like an achievement more substantive than mere foreground.

Sternfeld did not add color to an aesthetic practice already formed in black and white. Instead, he began his serious work as a photographer by working with color materials. The process of teaching himself how to make use of the medium in the late 1960s demanded both a high level of technical knowledge as well as an approach to organizing a picture that would take color as its core concern rather than piling it onto an existing pictorial practice. In his 1976 essay on William Eggleston, curator John Szarkowski suggested that the challenge facing color photographers was learning to see holistically rather than dividing their sight between what was subject on the one hand and hue on the other. He hinted at the conceptual difficulty of rethinking photographic practice to encompass color-as-subject by noting that it was only in recent years that photographers were guided by the logic that, “The world itself existed in color as though the blue and the sky were one thing.”

Throughout the early years of the decade, Sternfeld sought to establish a palette as well as to stabilize the look of his work. In a recent essay on Stephen Shore, Sternfeld noted the importance of developing an independent palette, writing, “[A] color photographer must choose a palette as painters would choose theirs.” In 1987, Anne W. Tucker wrote of Sternfeld’s color choices as the “somber and pastel ranges.” His preference for delicate, non-primary hues characterizes these earlier photographs as well. His choices were not a function of purely formal interests: over the course of the 1970s, Sternfeld came to believe that every historic period has its own characteristic color scheme and that the 1970s in America would be best represented by such colors, as well as by day-glo colors often associated with the 1960s.