![]() Photograph: Tom Powel Imaging Inc./Joel Sternfeld courtesy Luhring Augustine Gallery and Beetles + Huxley Gallery A native New Yorker, he has roamed through America constantly since earning a BA in Art from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1965, already obsessed with “the great underlying theme of my work: the utopian vision of America contrasted with the dystopian one”. “I’m utterly staggered by what has happened over the last 7,000 years,” he tells me, unprompted, at one point. The photographer is an affable, if slightly eccentric, interviewee whose answers often roam far and wide though history, literature and art. As ever, the sinister and the sly sit side by side. As well as teaching in New York, he currently has three series in production, including one provisionally titled A Book of Resemblances that gathers recent photographs, including a mummified sacrificial victim revealed by a melting glacier in Peru and a waxwork of Kim Kardashian. ![]() That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.” Today, he reiterates that sentiment: “A photograph is only a fragment of a shattered pot.” “You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo,” he told the Guardian in 2004. ![]() Called McLean, Virginia, 1978, that shot of the fireman, the pumpkins and the burning house is indeed a record of an actual event he witnessed, but the blaze is part of a training exercise from which the fireman is taking a break. Sternfeld’s images are often not quite what they seem. “I’ve been so busy making work, going from one project to the next without pause, that I’ve never had the time to reflect on what I’ve done.” By way of illustration, he tells me that many of the photographs in a more recent book, First Pictures, were discovered in an an old box containing a hundred rolls of film left unprocessed since the early 1970s. At 72, Sternfeld is, for the first time, delving into his archive. Intriguingly, the new London exhibition, called Colour Photographs: 1977-1988, includes several images that have not been seen before. Photograph: Joel Sternfeld courtesy Luhring Augustine Gallery and Beetles + Huxley Gallery Kansas City, Kansas, May 1983 by Joel Sternfeld. I didn’t quite fit into the old tradition or the new one.” And here I come with images that have some social concern in them so suddenly he’s calling me ‘the worried photographer’. He was totally against hot maple syrup humanism and concerned photography of any kind. “When I was making the work,” says Sternfeld, “I went to see John Szarkowski, who was the cool new curator at the time. Looking at American Prospects now, it’s almost comforting to be reminded that Donald Trump’s election victory has echoes of Reagan’s equally unlikely ascendancy. Its often ironic images – a circus elephant stranded on a rural road, a fireman apparently shopping for a pumpkin at a roadside stall while a house blazes in the background – are punctuated by more sinister elements: a looming battleship in Mobile, Alabama a primed missile in White Sands, New Mexico a row of aircraft carriers lining the horizon beyond a sunbathing, bikini-clad woman on a Florida beach. With its merging of the deadpan and the ominous, it has been as influential on succeeding generations of documentary photographers as Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places or William Eggleston’s Guide. The book that emerged, 1987’s American Prospects, is now regarded as a classic. “I was propelled by this very strong sense that I might disgrace myself, that I was taking this wonderful opportunity and absolutely blowing it.” “I had so little money, I often couldn’t afford to have a contact sheet printed,” he says, laughing. He was intent on leaving behind the generic New York street photography that had earned him the award for a more complex vision of America, which he pursued through large-scale colour prints full of fine detail and arresting tableaux. With the Guggenheim money, Sternfeld purchased a Volkswagen campervan and a large format 8x10 inch camera that had to be mounted on a tripod. If anything, there is an even stronger sense of apocalypse in the air today.” “The reason I am showing this work now,” he says of his forthcoming exhibition, “is that I remember feeling similar fears back then as I do now. I n 1980, as Ronald Reagan was in the process of being elected president, Joel Sternfeld was embarking on one of the many road trips across America he had been making since being awarded a Guggenheim grant in 1978.
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