American Prospects
Joel Sternfeld
American Prospects is a melancholic, spectacular, funny and profound portrait of America. First published in 1987 to great critical acclaim. In 2023 Steidl published the sixth revised editon. American Prospects is beautiful and uncomfortable and completely worthwhile.
Joel Sternfeld (born 1944 in New York) lives and works in New York. He is best known for his large-format colour pictures of contemporary American life and identity. American Prospects is his first and best-known book.
Sternfeld made the first of these photographs in 1978. In those days, colour photography as a fine art medium was still in his infancy. The publication of William Eggleston’s Guide, the moment that colour photography was perceived as artistically respectable, was only just in 1976. The work of Sternfeld contributed to the establishment of colour photography as a respected artistic medium.
The pictures in American Prospects are of people, buildings, and mostly landscapes form the multiple trips Sternfeld took between 1978 and 1984. The pictures show a postindustrial, service-oriented society devoted to technology, consumer spending, personal narcissism, and increasing unemployment, which masquerades as leisure time.
Sternfeld’s America most resembles that of Walker Evans 50 years earlier in American Photographs. Furthering the tradition of roadside photography started by Walker Evans in the 1930s, Sternfeld documents people and places with unexpected excitement, despair, tenderness, and hope. It was Walker Evans who first demonstrated, in American Photographs, that the elements of roadside America could be transformed by the camera into a coherent, meaningful visual story. American Photographs is a bittersweet elegy to rural America. Even more bleak is Robert Frank’s The Americans, a masterpiece that charts the face of postwar American society. His photographs home in on the tenderest of America’s sore spots: racism, alienation, the substitution of media-generated images for reality.
Sternfeld’s photographs present the events in the form of narrative scenes. In American Prospects each picture suggests an arcane drama being played out. An elephant stranded on a road in Oregon, or a pumpkin stall in Virginia behind which a house burns fiercely. These narrative hints make American Prospects less a series of photographs than a series of tales that add up to a cogent and persuasive view of America. Told with affection but also conveying the feeling that something is not quite right. America’s beauty, as Sternfeld perceived it, is troubled and uneasy. It evokes the same feeling of discomfort as Julie Blackmon’s photographs of innocent children playing. As if there is something sinister at work beneath it all.
One of the things that emerges is that despite advancing technology men is unable to avert disasters. A number of disasters populate the pages of American Prospets: floods, lost dogs, tornadoes, burning houses, renegade elephants, beached whales and stranded ships.
One of the disasters may be humanity itself. Sometimes America’s past leaks into the photographs and we can see how it was. But due to human interventions landscapes and traditions are changing and even disappearing. In the book there is a picture of a view on Matanuska Glacier in Alaska. In the foreground of the picture is a billboard for the sale of houses that will destroy this view.
Another thing that bothers is the visible tension between the American desire for freedom and their need for order. What seems so amusing at first glance: a renegade elephant in the middle of the road, being tugged by Lilliputian-sized humans. Resolves into the focus of the picture’s poignancy: a wild spirit, yearning to be free, is ensnared by civilization.
There will come a time that Sternfeld’s portrait of America will seem suffused with nostalgia. Much as we now see Walker Evans’s photographs of the 1930s. Their sometimes acid social commentary will lose much of its bite. But for now they still hold up a mirror for us. It is not too late to put aside our selfishness and think more carefully about the consequences of our actions.
American Prospects
Photographer: Joel Sternfeld
Originally published in 1987 by Times Books
Sixth revised edtion published in 2023 by Steidl
Hardback, 30,5 x 25,3 cm, 108 pages, 52 images
Text by Andy Grundberg
Considered as one of the greatest photobooks of all time by Source Magazine.
Mentioned in The Photobook: A History Volume 2. Edited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger.