Stephen Shore

Joel Sternfeld

Michael Fried

Christy Lange

Stephen Shore's photographs of ordinary America have had an extraordinary impact. Shore spent the 1970s crisscrossing the continent to assemble his two best known bodies of work. American Surfaces and Uncommon Places These photographs focused on the minutiae of modern life, unveiling the exceptional beauty to be found in banality and, in the process, pioneering the two most important photographic idioms of the past thirty years the diaristic snapshot (later taken up by such artists as Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans) and the monumentalized landscape (as practiced by such photographers as Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky) Shore was also one of the first art photographers to work in colour, capturing the sky blues, mustard yellows and avocado greens of a nation whose chromatic enthusiasm occasionally outstripped its taste. Less well known are Shore's earlier works While still in high school in the mid-1960s he undertook a three-year project shooting Andy Warhol's legendary studio, the Factory, at its creative peak, featuring a revolving cast of characters that included the Velvet Underground, Nico, Edie Sedgwick and of course Warhol himself Soon afterward, inspired by the intellectually fertile late-1950s New York art scene, Shore produced a body of conceptual work seldom exhibited but fully engaged with the revolutionary ideas shaking the foundations of modern art. These works are fascinating not only for their contribution to the redefinition of the art object but also for the way they prefigured much of Shore's work to fallow, including American Surfaces and Uncommon Places. Since the 1970s Shore has continued to expand his repertoire, moving effortlessly between black and white and colour, landscape and portraiture, large format and small in so doing, he has proven himself to be one of contemporary art's most vital photographers As fellow photographer Joel Sternfeld writes in the Focus section, 'What may ultimately be at stake in his pictures is the pure condition of sight itself.'

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Ian Frazier

Douglas Robert Nickel

The successful photographer shares his idiosyncratic vision of life in America by combining his evocative images with the musings of two great writers.

Stranger Passing

Anne Tucker

Andy Grundberg

Kerry Brougher

This is the definitive edition of Joel Sternfelds seminal American Prospects made from new printing plates and technology that did not exist at the time of the 2003 Steidl edition. The book is otherwise unchanged, except for the addition of one new image. The subjects of American Prospects include a fireman picking out a pumpkin at a farm stand while a classic American house burns in the background, a lone basketball hoop in a vast Southwestern desert reminiscent of the Creation, and whales beached in Oregon seemingly symbolic of ecological failure to come. These and other narrative pictures, helped open the gates for a new type of photography now practised by Gregory Crewdson, Rineke Dijkstra, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, and Jeff Wall, among many others By corrupting the purity of photography, Sternfeld played a pivotal role in moving the medium forward. (Kerry Brougher, Chief Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.) A major figure in the photography world, Joel Sternfeld was born in New York City in 1944. He has received numerous awards including two Guggenheim fellowships, a Prix de Rome and the Citibank Photography Award. Sternfelds books published by Steidl include American Prospects (2003), Sweet Earth (2006), Oxbow Archive (2008), First Pictures (2011) and On This Site (2012).

American Prospects

On a summer morning in 1833, Thomas Cole, a British-born, American landscape painter climbed to the top of Mount Holyoke in central Massachusetts and made a sketch of the Connecticut River where it bends and resembles an ox yoke. Three years later the sketch he made that morning became View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow). The four by six foot painting, now a key work of American art has been described as Cole's attempt to create a moving time/space panorama within a single frame - the passage of time is represented by the ongoing fury of the storm on the mountain as sunshine returns to the meadow below. Cole was skeptical about progress and the painting may represent a warning about the clearing of wilderness to make open land for farms and factories. Nearly two hundred years after Cole painted The Oxbow, the American photographic artist, Joel Sternfeld, walked into the mile square field depicted in the lower right quadrant of Cole's painting. Sternfeld had first photographed this field in 1978 while traveling on American Prospects. By the time he returned in 2006, the Oxbow in the river was crossed by an interstate highway and the destructive effects of progress that Cole had feared were making themselves apparent globally as climate change. Sternfeld spent the next year and a half walking that field, commuting to it on an almost daily basis from his home in southern Vermont. His archive is a record of classic New England seasonality, a nature study unlike any other as it is made with the foreknowledge that because of global warming it will never be the same again. His choice of subject matter, a flat unremarkable corn and potato field (archetypal new world crops), signals a conceptual stance away from previous nature depictions: his field is neither Beautiful, nor Sublime, nor Picturesque. The flatness of the field, an unusual stretch of visual freedom in the New England highlands offers an eloquent emptiness and a vessel for the true subject his work: iconic seasonal effect as manifestation of the orbiting Earth. Sternfeld's time landscape is also a companion piece to his recently published Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America and to When It Changed (pictures at the Montreal Climate Change Conference) and needs to be understood in terms of the political and cultural resonances of those works. Joel Sternfeld is a much published and exhibited artist. Amongst his previous books with Steidl are American Prospects and Walking the High Line.

Oxbow Archive

White Box (Art gallery : New York, N.Y.)

Documents the G8 Summit held in Genoa, Italy, July 19-21, 2001.

Protesting the G8 in Genoa

Treading on Kings

In Joel Sternfeld's now-classic view of America, a fireman shops for a pumpkin while a house burns in the background; a group of motorcyclists stop at the side of the road to take in a stunning, placid view of Bear Lake, Utah; the high-tech world headquar.

These picture stand as a heartfelt memorial. They mark sites that have become an indelible part of the American landscape. They ask us to stand on that difficult threshold between what has happened and what little remains; between what we know and what cannot be understood. This, too, is the American landscape.

Joel Sternfeld

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