Joel Sternfeld: Oxbow Archive

He ducks his head under the black cloth, his legs wedged between those of the tripod, to inspect the upside-down image on the camera's ground glass: a plowed field, a lone tree, a rainwater pond. There is a long silence, then Joel Sternfeld's muffled voice: "You see, it's just an ordinary field. Completely unmemorable."

Sun fingers long furrows, and a thickening cloud throws shadow over everything. Joel likes the fact that this is no bucolic view-shed, but a working farmer's field, a forgotten place improbably tucked between an interstate highway and a local road to Northampton, Massachusetts, with a short airstrip between. "Sometimes in the summer a skydiver parachutes down into a row of corn like a twenty-first-century deus ex machina," he says. Everything in this ordinary place, it seems, is also extraordinary.

Light moves across slabs of overturned earth where bits of blond cornstalk have been tilled in, and climbs the trees that mark (and hide) the winding Connecticut River. An oxbow swings out in front of Mount Tom. Beyond is the Holyoke Range, a scallop of mountains punctuated at each end by rough knobs: Mount Holyoke on one end, Mount Tom on the other. Between them, in a notch, is the smokestack of a coal plant—one of the five worst polluters in the state.

With monk-like devotion, Joel has been coming to this place almost every day for a year, photographing not only the cultivated part of the field, but also the scruffy, neglected sides. He says: "I might keep coming for another year. I don't know. No matter how often I come, it's never enough. There's so much here. Every minute brings change."

We walk down a dirt path. In a thicket are empty beer cans and an old tire; two fuzzy pink bedroom slippers lie in the dirt lane nearby—one is turned over, the other marches ahead, footless. We hear splashing: in a dark pond, two pairs of mallards swim away. "This scene is a whole story in itself," Joel says, but he does not photograph it. "I'm trying to take pictures of less and less."

Planes of light move inside the band of trees that follow the river. Now Mount Holyoke is obliterated by mist. Cloud shadows strafe the field, cutting it into black and brown ribbons. As the shadows move, the river trees darken, then grow viridescent—a green wall holding the oxbowed river to its twisting course.

In 1836 Thomas Cole painted View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, After a Storm, otherwise known as The Oxbow. Rolled-up canvas under his arm, the artist climbed to Mount Holyoke's summit and set his easel on an outcrop of rock. From this vantage point he created a split image of nature: on the dark left side of the canvas is an overlook with storm-ravaged trees, a chaos of rocks, and smoke from burning fields mingling with a retreating thunderstorm. On the right, far below, is a bird's-eye view of a bucolic world: a settled land with neatly cultivated fields, tiny farmhouses with smoke curling up from chimneys, and the river meandering through farmland, contained in a perfect, but censorious oxbow. Fresh, pale light washes the scene.

Cole's field is also Sternfeld's. Although he grew up in Queens, Joel wanted to be a farmer. He came to the Oxbow with a desire to show a small farm and its rustic ideals and seasonality. His year has gained him a working intimacy with nature: the rough thicket at the side of the field, snow buntings, winter-scarred furrows, browbeating hail, and the spurned genius of spring weeds.

But even as Joel sank his feet into river mud and felt firsthand the field's unruly harmonies, he also sensed its destruction. He battles feelings of powerlessness as he contemplates the extinctions and the radically altered landscapes we face with the changing climate: a crisis caused by human greed.

If Joel's earlier work has ironic aspects, these pictures have been shorn of them. His central character is now this field. Seasons alter it daily. Ripples of change cast spells on its surface. Tides of snow and light wash up and retreat. Ice thickens and melts. A passing deer leaves tracks. The pastoral ideal is dead.

The images in Oxbow Archive carry no narrative, no historical reference to the settling (or unsettling) of America, as Cole's painting did. There is only this place and its moods.

"Beauty stays; we go," the poet Joseph Brodsky said. It is predicted that by mid-century, we will have lost a million species of plants, birds, and animals. Once this genetic history is gone, there is no going back; it is lost forever. As seasons are more and more disrupted, as drought spreads, sea levels rise, aquifers are drained, crops fail, and violent storms increase, we humans will not be exempt from the list of extinctions.

James Lovelock is the British scientist who founded the Gaia theory—Earth understood as a massive single organism; he calls himself "a planetary physician." He has said: "The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that might last 100,000 years." As a result, humans, wildlife, and whole ecosystems will eventually become extinct. He predicts that the carrying capacity of the planet for humans in the near future will be only 500 million, down from a projected nine billion.

The climate clock is ticking. In coming to terms with the vulnerability of the planet for the first time, we recognize ourselves as saboteurs: the Earth as a living organism is dying as a result of our abuse. "We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady," Lovelock says.

Joel's archive of the instants and seasons of this field represents a world in jeopardy. Elegiac, haunted—these images are, as he says, "a little bit sad." But on another day, as spring turns to summer, he is beguiled by the field's many offerings of beauty.

The grooved cornfield's mud dries to a pale brown. Across the way, a potato seeder rumbles between furrows.

"Potatoes do well here," Joel says. "But when the plants are all leafed out, the farmers come along and spray them with a herbicide that kills off all the green leaves, allowing the tubers below to grow big. Of course those potatoes are also sucking up that poison." He gives an ironic smile. "I love the Polish farmers who own this field, but everything about the farming process is inimical to the Arcadian ideal."

Twenty thousand years ago, New England was covered by an ice sheet more than a mile thick. Fourteen thousand years ago, it began to melt. Sea levels rose six feet. Meltwater streaming from the ice that covered New Hampshire and Massachusetts carried a mass of sands and gravels that eventually formed a dam. The resulting lake was 140 miles long and 15 miles wide, extending from Lyme, New Hampshire, to Rocky Hill, Connecticut.

When the dam burst, the Connecticut River was born. Its waters cut down into the glacial lakebed until, near Northampton, linear stream sections changed into meanders and the famous oxbows formed.

The Earth is a living organism, and we live on its skin, whether it is land, water, or ice. Walking the field with Joel, I think of Greenland's melting continental ice—the last remnant of the Wisconsin Ice Age that once covered New England. Now Greenland's ice, and the seasonal sea ice that covers the circumpolar Arctic Ocean and Davis Strait, is melting at a far more rapid rate than anticipated, and as a result, every ecosystem on the planet is being affected.

The Arctic is the world's natural air conditioner. Without its ice, we fry. Ice and snow cover create an albedo effect: that is, the white surfaces radiate solar heat back into space, keeping the Earth cool. Warmer weather means stormier weather. Wind waves break up ice from below. As snow-covered lands in Tibet, China, Russia, and North America lose their white coat, dark seas and open land absorb heat and the Earth warms exponentially. Ten years ago, the seasonal sea ice in Greenland was fourteen feet thick; as of February 2007, the thickness averaged six inches.

Now in the Arctic, spring comes earlier most years but is made complicated by late, winterish storms. Bird and animal migrations shift haphazardly and are not always in sync with the necessary sources of water, ice, snow, and food. Plants bloom prematurely, then die off in late spring snows; fish and birds arrive before insects hatch and are left with nothing to eat. Melting ice is depriving Arctic animals of their birthing and hunting grounds. Polar bears, bearded and ringed seals, and walrus are starving.

Small changes have large effects. The average annual temperature of the planet is predicted to rise eight degrees centigrade over the next twenty-five years. Sea levels will rise and coastal populations in the millions will have to be displaced, or they will drown. Water sources for mountain peoples are beginning to disappear, as they will eventually for everyone on the planet.

Carbon sinks are becoming carbon sources. Phytoplankton, the main food source in the marine ecosystem, are decreasing. Warmer oceans are becoming more acidic, making it difficult for carbon to dissolve. But the ocean functions as a carbon sink in part because of the tiny organisms called coccolithophores. Dissolved carbon is necessary for the making of their shells; when they die, their discarded shells line the seabed with carbon-sequestering litter. Without them, warm acidic seas outgas carbon, and the air and water grow warmer.

Soil, plants, and trees are releasing more carbon dioxide than they did a quarter of a century ago. A car-driving population is growing. But perhaps of greatest concern is the release of methane from melting permafrost in Alaska, Nunavut, and Siberia. In Siberia alone, it is estimated that 100,000 tons of methane is released per day from melting bogs. Methane is a greenhouse gas twenty times more lethal than carbon dioxide.

What we are doing to the planet is unprecedented. But in this field in early spring, a temperate place with thriving trees, weeds, and crops, the crisis is difficult to comprehend. Joel says: "The field knows more about all this than we do." That is why he keeps coming back—to learn. His photographs are a surface like the Earth's skin; they register the nuances of living things.

The complexity of Joel's images is not only in the details of what can be seen in the frame, but also in the absences they represent: all of the past, all of the future. There is no before or after. There is only the event of the instant: we are teetering on the eve of the planet's sixth Mass Extinction—a global holocaust that began years ago but is only now being acknowledged.

"What are we seeing when we look at a photograph?" Joel asks.What aren't we seeing?

He looks toward the mountain and the hidden river. It is midday, mid-spring, and there are no shadows. There are only the fields, and the sides of the fields, and the memory of seasons and ice sheets that lay wind, snow, heat, rain, ice, and meltwater upon them.Everything that is absent from these photographs is also present: emptiness giving birth to form. The Ainu of Hokkaido, Japan, divided their ecosystem into "fields," saying: "This is the field where the bear likes to eat, this is the ocean field where the salmon come in spring, this is the field where the cranes return."

So Joel's field is a representation of an unseen whole: it is the icecap, the Tibetan Plateau, the snowfield, the birthing ground for whale, antelope, seal, woodcock, grizzly, and polar bear.

Each of Joel's images gives us single tastes of a threatened whole: a thawing bog, a fallow field disintegrating into dust, a glassy river through a screen of trees, a dead raccoon, tall corn, mown corn, an extinguished fire at river's edge, a snow-covered road, a water-drenched road, an empty road turning back into the field.

There is a solemnity to these photographs. In them are none of Cole's fervent ideas about cultivation and the future, or what Teddy Roosevelt called "the scandal of improvement." To create the "pastoral" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries required a clean-up. Before the neat farmstead could come into being, there was genocide: the cleansing of the land of its first peoples, and then of its trees; later, there was the senseless fragmentation of lands into homesteads with no regard for the needs and demands of the ecosystem. Much later, commercial fertilizers and herbicides came into use, and because of the plow, blowing topsoil became America's largest "export." The utopian Eden failed mid-dream because of human carelessness and greed.

We proceed without care; we are careless. The climate crisis represents another order of genocide—not what is being done to us, but what we are doing to the planet. What the people of the Arctic are experiencing now is an ecosystem dismemberment we are powerless to stop. It will soon come to our own back doors.

Click. Late autumn. A harvested cornfield with a few bedraggled stalks remaining, a threatening sky, black earth—is it a retreating thunderstorm or the aftermath of a battle? Is this an evocation of the world after too many extinctions, too many climate refugees gobbling up unharvested corn? Is it a killing field or a field that has given its all and has now been drenched with rain?

Click. Midwinter. Nothing goes unnoticed. But one photograph is an opacity that goes against seeing. It is tonally split, more like a painting by Mark Rothko than a photograph. Nuanced and spare, the image is pale gray on the top, while the bottom half is white with a faint horizon of mountains and trees running horizontally across the middle. This is a photograph of a field taken from winter's point of view; all human thought has been excluded—a reminder that we humans are not necessarily here to stay.

Click. Mid-autumn. A vegetative screen: green going to gold, vines drooping, trees releasing their leaves. This is the yellowing page of an old season turning. The sun's spotlight, soft now, lies against the edge of a fallow field. The Earth as we have known it will cease to exist. Perhaps we will be de-seasoned: no winter at all, only summer's slow burn for 365 days.

In the field the wind shifts, and clouds drop down over the ruffled mountains. Where Joel is standing, there is sun. Curve-cuts in the dirt, made by the plow, shine. Here and there, small ponds of accumulated rainwater carry ducks and moving clouds. "You should have seen the thousands of swallows that appeared one day as a black cloud," he says.

Earlier in the week, a blinding rain stirred the field into mud. Now the heat comes on, and with it, a mirage. Steam rises from the hot-bodied earth, bent by the wind. "Have you seen sea-smoke?" Joel asks, almost in a whisper. He sets up his camera in plowed dirt and slides a film holder into the back of his 8 by 10.

"This field is taking over my life," he says. Now there is no time for "feigned ignorance"—which is irony—or for ignorance of any kind. He has come to this field as a student to a teacher: to learn, to gain intimacy, to become lost.

Is this the Earth breathing or dying?

The mist thins and comes clear: it is a sheer light, a transparency, a lens through which we see with new eyes the mountain, the trees, the field, and, as evening comes, the hidden river carrying away the light.