Joel Sternfeld

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Joel Sternfeld (born June 30, 1944 in New York , NY , USA ) is an American photographer .

He is one of the photographers who discovered color for artistic photography at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s and thus set a school under the term New Color .

life and work

Joel Sternfeld studied at Dartmouth College and has been teaching photography at Sarah Lawrence College in New York since 1985 .

His work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago , the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , the Museum of Modern Art , New York, the Tate Modern London, the SMAK Gent , the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Museum Folkwang , among others .

In 1978 and 1982, Sternfeld received two Guggenheim grants for realizing his American Prospects group . In 1990/91 he received the Prix ​​de Rome . Sternfeld was one of the 2004 Citigroup Photography Prize winners .

Intensive research accompanies his work, which he usually conceives as self-contained work groups. The publication of a photo book for the respective group of works underlines this. The individual photographs often have a descriptive title that describes what is depicted, the place and the date. Sternfeld repeatedly deals with the possibilities of photographic representation and their reception . So he writes in Tatorte regarding his motives:

“But there was something else that drove me to do this work. Something I'd like to call a problem of discernibility. Experience has taught me again and again that you can never know what is hidden under a surface or behind a facade. When assessing a place, looking at photographs of a landscape, our understanding is inevitably subject to misinterpretations. "

Selected groups of works

Sweet earth

Sweet Earth is Joel Sternfeld's in-depth exploration of the USA and an important part of his research into landscape as evidence of human socialization, interventions and utopias. Many aspects of his previous work are taken up, especially the study of Arcadian and dystopian locations. Sweet Earth can be seen as a complementary addition to On This Site . In both groups of works, the photography is complemented by carefully researched texts that reveal some things that go beyond what is depicted in the photograph and thus open up an additional context. While both groups of works document original locations, they simultaneously ask profound questions about the possibilities of photographic representation.

Walking the high line

In 2000 and 2001, Sternfeld photographed the High Line , which was closed in 1980 and threatened with demolition , an elevated railway line on the Lower West Side of Manhattan . With the help of these photographs, it was possible to preserve the railway line that has meanwhile been taken by nature. It has since been turned into a park.

Tatorte (On This Site)

The New York Times described Joel Sternfeld's photographic documentation of places that were scenes of crimes and acts of violence in the near or distant past as a “travel guide through America in times of violence, fear and moral crises” .

They are quiet, unspectacular images: landscapes, streets, houses, intersections, green spaces that no longer show anything of the mostly bloody events that took place here. Only the concise, sober texts written by the artist clarify that these are crime scenes: fresh flowers at the spot on the lawn of a hospital building where a doctor collapsed, fatally hit by bullets from a fanatical opponent of abortion; a wreath on the railing of the balcony on which Martin Luther King was shot in 1968 - such indirect references in the pictures themselves are the exception. Only the concise, sober texts accompanying the recordings make it clear that these are not just random places, but rather crime scenes where brutal crimes took place.

Joel Sternfeld is not interested in sensations. His collection of seemingly harmless, everyday scenes, whose violent past cannot be seen, aims to stimulate thought - about everyday violence, the inadequacy of our perception and the ease with which we can forget.

Campagna Romana

The landscape south and east of Rome around the Claudian aqueduct is the focus of the group of works. Her unusual light, her presence of ancient Roman civilization, influences Sternfeld, just as she has drawn painters from Turner to Corot . In Sternfeld's color photographs, opposites from the past and present collide: ancient tombs, villas, arches, temples next to high-rise buildings, shopping centers and the disfigurement of the modern suburbs. Much of the landscape that Sternfeld photographed is threatened by urban sprawl and destruction. In this respect, there is a parallel to Oxbow Archive in terms of content .

American Prospects

The first photographs from this group of works were taken in 1978, when color photography as an artistic medium was still in its infancy. Sternfeld used an 8x10 large format camera to get the best possible details. He experimented with color theories that he adopted from painting and architecture.

Sternfeld shows the USA similar to a Walker Evans 40 years earlier. But while Evans saw a physically crumbling but spiritually intact nation, Sternfeld finds a world full of shiny new buildings surrounded by a shaken human spirit.

Oxbow Archive

For two years (2005–2007), Joel Sternfeld photographed the area at the oxbow of the Connecticut River in Massachusetts , called 'The Oxbow'. This created a kind of photographic archive or memory of a landscape that constantly changes with the change of the seasons. The area in the Connecticut River has been a symbol of the national landscape of the United States since Thomas Cole's painting "View from Mount Holyoke, Horthampton Massachusetts" (1836, Washington, Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Sternfeld's skeptical and at times loving depiction of the zeitgeist of the time, with all its beauties, peculiarities and hopeful utopias, shaped a new photographic practice and became an important reference work for many artists.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kunstforum International, Vol. 171, July-August 2004, p. 326
  2. ↑ The J. Paul Getty Museum: Joel Sternfeld ( Memento of the original from July 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved February 7, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.getty.edu
  3. ↑ C / O Berlin: Joel Sternfeld Retrospective 12/11/12 to 13/01/13 . Retrieved February 7, 2016.
  4. ↑ BBC: Citigroup Photography Prize 2004
  5. ↑ a b Joel Sternfeld, Armin Harris (ed.): Tatorte - Pictures against forgetting, Schirmer / Mosel, 1996, ISBN 3-88814-668-2 .
  6. ^ Joel Sternfeld: Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America, Steidl, Göttingen, 2006, ISBN 978-3-86521-124-8
  7. ^ Joel Sternfeld: Walking the High Line, Steidl, Göttingen, 2009, ISBN 978-3-86521-982-4
  8. ↑ Joel Sternfeld: Capagna Romana. The Countryside of Ancient Rome, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1992, ISBN 0-679-41578-5
  9. ^ Joel Sternfeld: Oxbow Archive, Steidl, Göttingen, 2008, ISBN 978-3-86521-786-8
  10. ^ Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects, Distributed Art Publishers, New York, 2003, ISBN 3-88243-915-7
personal data
SURNAME Sternfeld, Joel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photographer
DATE OF BIRTH June 30, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH new York