Joel Sternfeld’s landmark portrait of American pathos & dreams

After receiv­ing a Guggen­heim Fel­low­ship in 1978 pho­tog­ra­ph­er Joel Stern­feld hit the road in a Volk­swa­gen camper van to fol­low the sea­sons across the Unit­ed States. 8 x 10 view cam­era in tow, he left behind his native Brook­lyn and street pho­tog­ra­phy prac­tice in search of some­thing greater still.

Stern­feld remem­bers an apoc­a­lyp­tic sense hung in the air, the nation still reel­ing from the abject fail­ure of the Viet­nam War and the utter dis­grace of the Nixon Pres­i­den­cy. Des­per­ate for the illu­sion of nor­mal­cy, vot­ers tuned out warn­ings from then-Pres­i­dent Jim­my Carter of a mind­less malaise seep­ing into the nation’s soul, elect­ing a B‑list Hol­ly­wood actor with an itchy trig­ger fin­ger to the White House in 1980.

Over the course of a decade, Stern­feld returned to the road time and again with the sup­port of addi­tion­al NEA and Guggen­heim grants. Work­ing with a large for­mat cam­era required a new approach; at sev­en dol­lars a sheet of film, he immersed him­self in the land­scape, men­tal­ly sto­ry­board­ing images that dis­tilled the emo­tion­al com­plex­i­ty of a nation bar­rel­ing into the dystopi­an spec­tre of late empire.

From the out­set of his career, Stern­feld worked in colour and was fas­ci­nat­ed by the ways in which it could ele­vate the medi­um to lev­els yet to be revealed. Colour was a moody, myth­ic force that had the pow­er to reveal pro­found psy­cho­log­i­cal truths of time and place.

For Stern­feld, the view cam­era proved the per­fect instru­ment, it’s mon­u­men­tal for­mat requir­ing him to devel­op rhythms nat­u­ral­ly aligned with the land­scape. ​“I can wan­der around all day long and nev­er press the shut­ter, and it’s active and excit­ing every minute of the day; I’m always see­ing things and think­ing things and hav­ing mem­o­ries,” he says.

In 1987, Stern­feld pub­lished the work as Amer­i­can Prospects to wide acclaim, his majes­tic por­trait of Man­i­fest Des­tiny run amok. He pho­tographed out­side New York’s noto­ri­ous Atti­ca Cor­rec­tion­al Facil­i­ty, the Viet­nam Veteran’s Memo­r­i­al, and an aban­doned ura­ni­um refin­ery forced on the lands of the Nava­jo Nation. Among his most famous images from the series is a two-sto­ry house on fire just behind farmer’s mar­ket and pump­kin patch in McLean, Vir­ginia — a train­ing exer­cise, view­ers might learn after the fact, the truth only adding to its complexities.

Draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from Walt Whit­man, who kept revis­ing Leaves of Grass all his life, Stern­feld returned to Amer­i­can Prospects (Stei­dl) in 2020 to con­tem­plate his por­trait of the nation anew. The revis­it­ed edi­tion makes vis­i­ble his­to­ries intrin­si­cal­ly woven into the Amer­i­can land­scape that have oth­er­wise gone over­looked: that of indige­nous nations who have been stew­ards of the land for mil­len­nia now liv­ing inside the bel­ly of the beast.

Tak­en togeth­er, these pho­tographs speak of Two Amer­i­c­as — myth and truth — that have always coex­ist­ed in plain sight. ​“In the future, no doubt, these images will seem suf­fused with nos­tal­gia, much as we now see Walk­er Evans’s pho­tographs of the 1930s,” pho­to crit­ic Andy Grund­berg writes in the book. ​“But for now they speak of a time when progress lost its sense of inevitability.”

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