Joel Sternfeld Book order

The narrative intertwines Joel Sternfeld's personal journey with the evolution of his color theory over five decades. In 1975, facing a life-changing surgery, he sought solace in Nags Head, North Carolina, capturing dreamlike photographs of beachgoers that marked his first exploration of a season. The tragic loss of his brother cut this period short, but it inspired a pivotal moment at Rockaway Beach, where he discovered beauty in unexpected places. This realization ultimately shaped his acclaimed work, "American Prospects," reflecting his ambition to depict the changing seasons across America.

In one of his final acts as mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani signed an order allowing the demolition of the High Line, the cherished elevated railroad that meandered down Manhattan's west side. Those who experienced the High Line adored its wildflowers sprouting through old tracks, the seasonal migration of birds, and the unique rural ambiance it offered amidst the urban landscape. However, landowners beneath the High Line coveted the site for high-rise developments, prompting Giuliani's order. In response, the Friends of the High Line, led by Robert Hammond and Joshua David, quickly took legal action to seek an injunction. Joel Sternfeld had already been documenting this hidden gem through every season, capturing its beauty for New Yorkers. In October 2001, as the remnants of the World Trade Center smoldered, Gerhard Steidl accepted Sternfeld's urgent request to create a book. Together, they designed Walking the High Line, which was completed in just seven weeks, ultimately envisioning the successful park that now attracts over two million visitors annually. This new edition includes nine additional photos, a larger format, and an updated timeline, showcasing the book that made the High Line's transformation possible.

Present intimations of a disordered future: Joel Sternfeld's photographs of modernity's prospects Joel Sternfeld's History in Picturesoffers a space in which human history and what it means to be human in the world now may be considered. Using unaltered photographs and texts that look behind and around the images, Sternfeld (born 1944) speculates on representative moments and sites to create a portal to what will be on the other side if our course goes unaltered. Sternfeld's pictures often puzzle with notions of Westernization, globalization and identity, such as a young man in rural Peru selling a hot dog on a croissant with evident discomfiture, a girl role-playing as a French maid in a club in Japan, a wax figure of Kim Kardashian at Madame Tussauds and Rocko Gieselman, the first University of Vermont student to register an undefined gender. Modernism, contradiction, inequality, hate, technology, high science and emergent sexual identities have reshaped human existence forever. History in Picturesallows a view back onto ourselves at a time when things are changing so quickly.

In the early morning of 14 April 2018, David Buckel walked into Prospect Park in New York City and set himself alight. He was a distinguished attorney whose work to secure social justice and LGBT rights had won national acclaim. At the time of his death at the age of 60 Buckel had left the practice of law and was working on a community farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn, as the head of composting. He was married to a man with whom he, and a married lesbian couple, were co-raising a college-bound daughter. In an email sent to the New York Times moments before his death Buckel decried the increasing pollution of the earth. He expressed the hope that his death by fossil fuels would encourage others to be better stewards and cohabitants of the earth. Joel Sternfeld happened to be in Prospect Park on that day with his nine-year-old son. Returning the next day he began to document the gradual regeneration of the site as a means to honor the hope that climate change might be reversed. Our Loss is the latest book by Sternfeld in his ongoing exploration of the effects of climate change, following Oxbow Archive (2008) and When it Changed (2008).

In his 1992 work, Joel Sternfeld examined the ruins of grand structures, warning that great civilizations fall, including our own. In his latest exploration, he expands on this theme, questioning the identity of modern Romans and their connection to the splendor of the past. He probes the nature of contemporary life against the backdrop of an idealized Arcadia, pondering the possibility of Utopia in today's world. The Campagna, the countryside surrounding Rome, holds a significant place in both Roman and human history. Once a polluted, malarial landscape, it was revitalized by emperors, flourishing with towns and villas, and nourished by aqueducts. However, after the fall of Rome, the Campagna became desolate for over a millennium, marked by gloomy tombs and ruins. This landscape attracted artists like Dürer, Lorrain, and Turner, who sought to understand Rome's greatness and its decline. They envisioned a time when Roman gods roamed and humanity thrived in a golden age. While central Rome transformed with Baroque architecture concealing history, the Campagna remained a canvas where the past was visible, allowing for limitless imagination.

“I went to Central Park to find the place behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art where Jennifer Levin had been killed. It was bewildering to find a scene so beautiful … to see the same sunlight pour down indifferently on the earth. As I showed the photograph of this site to friends, I realized that I was not alone in thinking of her when walking by the Met. It occurred to me that I held something within: a list of places that I cannot forget because of the tragedies that identify them, and I began to wonder if each of us has such a list. I set out to photograph sites that were marked during my lifetime. Yet, there was something else that drew me to this work. I think of it as the question of knowability. Experience has taught me again and again that you can never know what lies beneath a surface or behind a façade. Our sense of place, our understanding of photographs of the landscape is inevitably limited and fraught with misreading.”

This is the first book of Sternfeld’s largely unseen early colour photographs. In 1969 Sternfeld began working with a 35 mm camera and Kodachrome film, and First Pictures contains works from this time until 1980. Here Sternfeld develops traits that appear in his mature work: irony, a politicised view of America, concern for the social condition. But there are also pictures that bear little relation to his later work: colour arrangements that parallel those of Eggleston, as well as street photography which Sternfeld ceased making in 1976. The photographs in First Pictures were made at a time when colour photography was struggling to assert itself against the authoritative black and white tradition, making this book a revelation both in Sternfeld’s oeuvre and in the history of contemporary photography. 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. Sternfeld’s books published by Steidl include American Prospects (2003), Sweet Earth (2006) and Oxbow Archive (2008).

As Paris and its shopping arcades were to the 19th Century, Dubai and its wondrous malls may be to the new millennium. The Baudelarian flâneur, is replaced by the phoneur, a wired wanderer who uses the cell phone to text and call and access the internet, all the while snapping digital images on the fly. If the arcades were representative sites of early capitalism, then perhaps the postmodern shopping playgrounds of Dubai are exemplars of advanced capitalism. With this in mind, when Joel Sternfeld visited these malls in 2008, he documented them with the consumer fetish object of the moment the iPhone. In the process, he achieves a very particular unity of form and content; the object that encapsulates the spirit of an era is used to document that era. The ramifications of a profusion of mobile phone cameras around the globe are numerous. We have already witnessed this phenomenon becoming a platform for news construction with civilian journalism changing the documentation of events. In Dubai, Joel Sternfeld uses his iPhone camera to get past mass media images of the Emirate as Disney World on the Persian Gulf, and find a human component.

In 1836, the landscape painter and conservationist Thomas Cole completed "View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow)," his iconic painting of the Connecticut River where it bends like an ox yoke. Nearly 200 years later, Joel Sternfeld walked into the field depicted in the lower right quadrant of Cole's painting--which he had first photographed in 1978 while traveling for his seminal American Prospects series--and began making almost daily photographs. By 2006, the oxbow in the river was crossed by an interstate highway and the destructive effects of progress which Cole had so feared were making themselves apparent globally as climate change. This volume collects 77 of the quietly haunting photographs that Sternfeld made over the next year-and-a-half. His choice of subject matter--a flat, unremarkable corn and potato field--signals a conceptual stance away from previous nature His field is neither beautiful, nor sublime, nor picturesque. Its flatness offers an eloquent emptiness, as well as a vessel for the true subject of this work--the effects of human consumption upon the natural world. Following Sternfeld's Sweet Experimental Utopias in America and When It Changed , this volume resounds with political and cultural implications.

Future generations will question the inhabitants of Earth during the onset of climate change. As seas rise and drinking water becomes scarce, they will seek to understand the scientific evidence we had and our responses. In 2005, I traveled to Montreal to photograph participants at the eleventh United Nations conference on climate change. The result is a collection of 53 color portraits that capture the anxiety of modernity and ecological collapse, fitting within a long tradition of portraiture. Accompanying these images is a text compiled from newspapers and journals, chronicling climate change over the past 20 years. It reflects the evolving thoughts of scientists and climatologists, the actions of governments and NGOs, and the dramatic events unfolding in our landscapes. The title may suggest a hopeful turning point, as recent years have seen growing recognition of the climate crisis, leading to positive global responses. If these efforts succeed, this period could be remembered as a pivotal moment in reshaping the human-earth relationship.