Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video

Over the past twenty years, Sternfeld has amassed a large and diverse body of landscape photographs and portraits characterized by a curious mixture of premeditation and spontaneity. In the pictures of the 1990s, culled from his travels across America and collected in the book Stranger Passing (2001), it is clear that the artist works within certain fixed parameters. Shooting from a respectful distance of several yards, he isolates individuals or couples in otherwise unpopulated settings. Sternfeld does not attempt to startle or catch his subjects off guard; they are fully aware of the camera and address it directly. Despite this obvious calculation, one is hard pressed to describe any of his subjects as posedbe any of his subjects as posed. Each appears to have been caught in the midst of some activity, which will be resumed as soon as the photographer leaves. The domestic servant will return to her place settings, the tattooed jogger will complete his run around the lake, and the harried bank executive will attempt to finish his crossword puzzle. The interruptive quality of these photographs renders a somewhat paradoxical brand of portraiture; Sternfeld's subjects are clearly willing to surrender their images and a moment of time, yet they insist on remaining anonymous. The viewer collects only incidental details of person and place to arrive at generic identities for these men and women.

More recently, Sternfeld chronicled a comparable diversity in "Treading on Kings," his series of photographs of antiglobalism protestors at the G-8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001. The G-8, or Group of Eight, is an informal international planning body that includes representatives of France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, Japan, Canada, the United States, and Russia, and meets annually to discuss political and economic issues of global concern. Sternfeld's portraits of protesters, like those in Stranger Passing, possess a curious spontaneity, as though the subjects were only briefly distracted from the urgency of the demonstrations. Beyond their value as journalistic documents, these impromptu portraits carry a political message about the diversity and passion of resistance to the global economic homogenization advanced at the G-8 Summit.