Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman

Joel Sternfeld started his career firmly dedicated to using color film. His major artistic shift came in the late 1960s, when he transitioned from capturing street scenes with a small camera to more landscape-based studies of American life with a large-format camera. Though his method changed, Sternfeld was consistent in advocating for color, which he described as an aesthetic tool that brought forth important themes in his work: “In the good or successful color photographs the meaning or the definition of the picture will arise, somehow, through the use of color.”

Sternfeld’s interest in color grew out of his appreciation of photographers who had already made significant strides in bridging the gap between color photography and the fine-art world, particularly Ernst Haas, Eliot Porter, Stephen Shore, and most notably, Helen Levitt, who encouraged Sternfeld to create color street photographs. However, Sternfeld’s 1978 Guggenheim grant—awarded specifically for color photography—gave him the opportunity to dramatically shift his practice away from street photography and to embark on a nearly decade-long project that began as a cross-country drive. This photographic pilgrimage echoed the tradition of other notable photographers such as Walker Evans and Robert Frank, both of whom chronicled the sites and people of America.

Sternfeld’s project eventually concluded in 1987 with the influential publication American Prospects: Photographs by Joel Sternfeld. Anne W. Tucker’s catalog essay situates Sternfeld’s series as both objectively documenting and critically commentating on American life: “By the title American Prospects, Joel Sternfeld might be referring both to America’s future and to its commanding views .... Eschewing both the heart of the 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.” The American Prospects photographs are replete with details, captured as a consequence of the large-format negative. However, the most compelling subject matter is often hidden, masked by Sternfeld’s deliberate use of perspective and color to add layers of complexity to seemingly straightforward images. Sternfeld took a nearly anthropological stance toward his subjects, keeping himself and the camera distant from the more dramatic aspects of the scene, such as a house on fire in the background of his photograph of McLean, Virginia (page 213). Similarly, Sternfeld obscured the details of scenes by photographing images where man-made objects bleed into the natural landscape, as in After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California, July 1979 (page 215), where the earth-toned hues of the ravine, homes, and trees initially mask the destroyed car embedded in the uniformly brown landscape. The variety and scope of Sternfeld’s images prompted curator Kevin Moore to claim that the series embodies the “synthetic culmination of so many photographic styles of the 1970s, incorporating the humor and social perspicacity of street photography with the detached restraint of New Topographies photographs and the pronounced formalism of works by so many late-decade colorists.”