Renowned photographer Joel Sternfeld to speak at the Hall Art Foundation on Saturday

Joel Sternfeld, American visual artist, writer, and educator, will be speaking at the Hall Art Foundation in Reading this Saturday, October 11. He’ll discuss his decades of creative endeavors that sent him across this country in search of beauty, juxtaposed landscapes, and the essential thread that connects us all.

Beginning with his acclaimed collection, “American Prospects,” first published in 1987, Sternfeld spoke to the Standard about the cross-country creative journey that created this collection, and how it expanded not only his photography skills but also established his ethos as an artist.

“I had so many things I was trying to say all at once,” Sternfeld began. “The nature of my life during this era consisted of traveling in a Volkswagen camper, keeping diaries, and dedicating time from the hours of 2 – 4 a.m. to writing ferociously about the world I was experiencing. Some of these diaries are filled with simple observations about the standard happenings of 1970s and early 80s America -- the old industrial core of America was declining; a brand-new world of technology was arising. Modernity was rearing its ugly head; postmodern thought was cropping up more in photography, and I was there in the middle of the country trying to grapple and capture it all.”

“By nature, I am a landscaper,” Sternfeld continued. “My greatest love in this life has been the seasons. I remember being three years old, planting trees behind the garage because I knew that trees needed shade. I remember being five years old and planting seeds in a wet, cold soil, as low, fast clouds moved over me on a cold March morning, and feeling a strange sensation come over me. I had no name or explanation for this feeling and had no way of explaining it to anyone around me. Thankfully, when I got to be about nine or ten, I read about the transcendentalists. What a relief it was to come to these authors and realize not only had others experienced what I had when interacting with the natural world, but that there was a name for it – that I was not completely crazy.”

For Sternfeld, growing up out West, surrounded by strip malls and gas stations, instilled a deep yearning early on to experience that which Emerson and Thoreau wrote so abundantly about – the unadulterated natural world.

“I grew up with a sort of Saturday Evening Post-Reader's Digest vision of regional America. I wanted to experience the red clay dirt of the South. I wanted Arizona’s turquoise sunsets. I grew up near the ocean, and to me, the coast felt lonely. I wanted to know the feeling of inland – of going to Valley Hi and nestling deep into a valley. I wanted the feeling of being enveloped; to experience the America I had fantasized about so frequently as a child.”

So, in 1978, Sternfeld bought a camper, began experimenting with 8x10 color film, and set off across the country. “I had traveled and knew enough to understand this utopic ideal of America that the transcendentalists captured didn’t really exist anymore. But what I really wanted to see was if this new America of interstates and fast-food chains, of motels and quasi-European aesthetics could be made to fit within the landscape tradition that I loved so dearly.”

During this exploration, Sternfeld followed his “seasonal pleasures,” experiencing autumn while traveling from Maine to Georgia, winter across Texas and Arizona, spring out west and down the coast.

“There were these broad parameters [of seasonality] I was chasing, combined with a very particular sense of story being crafted throughout my travels. It was a complex thread to weave, and so I wrote and wrote – filling diaries upon diaries as I grappled with each photograph taken, each landscape observed.”

Part of Sternfeld’s cross-country renaissance was born out of his work with color photography. Finding a way to capture the emotionality he was experiencing, Sternfeld discovered a form that diverged from the standard black and white pictures being taken by artists of that era.

“There was no sense of naturalism to the color that was being used in photography at that time, but nonetheless, I felt committed to it after trying black and white and realizing only color could capture the seasonal effect I was chasing.”

“When working with color,” Sternfeld explained, “The artist is faced with the question – what do I do with this color? Should I clobber the audience with it? Should I exaggerate it? Understate it? How do I operate with this device?”

For Sternfeld, the answer came one dreary August day in 1975, on the shores of Rockaway Beach in New York. He told the Standard, “I had returned to New York after receiving some devastating family news. One day I went to the beach, and instead of turning to the right, where the landscape was pretty and pleasing to the eye, I turned left and went down Rockaway Beach towards a group of rundown apartment houses. I'm phobic about large buildings by the sea. The wind was blowing, and it was one of those August days that just made my skin crawl – summer was over, and the air felt raw and abrasive. In the midst of this terrible feeling, I began to cry for my family, for how lost I feel in the world. Suddenly, the scene looked beautiful to me. I made a picture and then put the thought away.”

It was not until a year and a half later, when sifting through work for his Guggenheim Fellowship, that Sternfeld came across the photo again.

“This scene is largely constructed of two or three hues of equal density. There is the pale buff of the sand and the pale grayish buff of the buildings, [combined with] a blue sky made mute by the sand blowing through the air. The balance of light and density struck me deeply and would later become the formal device I honed and perfected over the years as a photographer in ‘American Prospects’ and all collections to follow. It wasn’t just that I found the balance transcendent, but I also found this form metaphoric of the kind of pseudo-sophistication cropping up in America. As I was traveling, I was constantly looking for this certain criterion to photograph. If a scene did not have the color scheme, the balance of light, the muted palette, I would simply move on.”

To linger on the feeling he first felt on the Rockaway Beach that day in August, where beauty collided with sadness and terror, Sternfeld spoke to the Standard about how beauty manifests itself in photography and how he seeks to capture that which is beautiful through the lens of his camera.

Sternfeld said, “I haven't fully worked out what would be beautiful to me. I think for sure, in a lot of my pictures, you see a bittersweet quality. There is an old saying that goes, ‘beauty walks along the edge of opposites.’ Both in my life and in my work, this saying holds true. It coincides with Platonic opposites -- light and dark, Ying and Yang, the two hands of God -- the nature of existence. Maybe beauty is seeing both the light and the dark existing simultaneously in existential wonder. Maybe beauty is simply a shorthand for feeling that defies any and all characterization by language.”

He concluded, “It is not my job to say what is beautiful, as it is not my place to say what is true. All I can do is capture that which compels me, and hope it reaches those who are equally compelled by the world we inhabit.”

From haunting cityscapes to constructions of landscape simultaneously containing both sprawling nature and industrialized America, Sternfeld has dedicated the last sixty years of his life to capturing the world as it is – complicated, beautiful, ominous, and absolute.

An artist that comes around once in a generation, Sternfeld will share his knowledge and artistic insight with those of the Upper Valley this Saturday, October 11 at 4 p.m. at the Hall Art Foundation.

Tickets can be found: https://tinyurl.com/4ymd2fsx (https://tinyurl.com/4ymd2fsx)

For those unable to attend, twenty of Sternfeld’s large-scale color photographs from his celebrated collections – “American Prospects” and “Walking the High Line” are currently on display and will remain at the Hall Art Foundation through November 30.