Joel Sternfeld
				American, born 1944
		Website about the artist: no website
			Introduction
			Sternfeld was born in New York City in 1944 and graduated with a BA from Dartmouth College in 1965. He taught photography at several colleges before moving to Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, where he has taught since 1985. For 20-odd years Joel Sternfeld has traveled around the United States with a view camera, photographing places, mostly built-up places with people in them. After a while he began to put his human subjects in the foreground, although his settings lost very little of their expressiveness. The diversity of Sternfeld's people, together with his view-camera formality, invite comparison with August Sander's monumental effort at making a collective portrait of the German people in the 20th century. But the large scale and painstaking detail of Sternfeld's color prints combine to create a tissue of incongruities; it is as if any old-fashioned conception of unity, or even totality, must collapse if we are given a large enough number of facts. These works tell us in the most ambiguous way that this is the humanized landscape Americans have made for themselves to live in, and these are the people we have available to love, if we choose to. Sternfeld seems much concerned with the exterior aspects of both people and things. In fact, he portrays people as if they were things, rendering them with an agnostic indifference to their actual lives and the character of their social order; yet he seems to harbor a kind of reverence for the surfaces they create for themselves. In Surfers Passing, Salmon Creek Beach, California, we see a pair of possibilities. The surfer at left, who shows the effects of middle age in his graying hair, is wearing a smooth, black wet suit. The other has had at least his upper body tattooed, and he wears a wet suit with striping that wouldn't be out of place in an abstract painting. Sternfeld is very good at noticing our attempts to accessorize what seems at first sight to be a bleak reality. The good news is that if we give up traditional expectations we can take pleasure in our appearances understood as awkward but hopeful assemblage. Compared with such an observer of American confusion as Miss Lonelyhearts, Sternfeld seems almost sanguine. It can be argued that our logos and our tract suburbs and our Rollerblades are truly what we have in common; in other respects we just might be, to our credit, more individual, not to say more weird, than our grandparents. This is the way we and our country look now; increasingly, it is how the whole world looks. With a selective eye and perhaps some selective work with color printing--these photographs are visually if not politically engaged--Sternfeld has made found-object beauty out of the warmth and maladroitness his view camera captures for us.