McLean, Virginia, December

Joel Sternfeld

Among the pioneers of color photography, Joel Sternfeld has been documenting Americans and the urban and natural landscapes in which they live since the 1970s, amassing a visual record of his home country captured with sensitivity and wryness. Together with such masters of New American Color Photography as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, Sternfeld has spent his career finding poetry in the overlooked and the everyday. In 1978, he embarked upon a Robert Frank-style journey across America, taking photographs with a large-format camera for what became his epic “American Prospects” series (1979-83). This has been followed by numerous other series, each focused on different aspects of American life and culture, including alternative lifestyle communities, environmental degradation, historical sites, and strangers. With an eye for the absurd as well as the quietly monumental, Sternfeld captures all of his subjects with dignity.