Bøger af Joel Sternfeld

Born of a desire to follow the seasons up and down America, and equally to find lyricism in contemporary American life despite all its dark histories, American Prospects has enjoyed a life of acclaim. Its pages are filled with unexpected excitement, despair, tenderness and hope. Its fears are expressed in beauty, its sadnesses in irony. Oddly enough, the society it seems to presage has now come to be; oddly enough, the ideas of this book bespeak our present moment.Often out of print, this new edition of Joel Sternfeld's seminal book returns to the format of the original 1987 edition. All of the now classic images within it-alongside a group of never published photographs-examine a once pristine land stewarded by indigenous peoples who needed no lessons in stewardship, and a land now occupied by a mix of peoples hoping for salvation within the fraught paths of late capitalism. The result suggests a vast nation whose prospects have much to do with global prospects, a "teenager of the world" unaware of its strengths, filled with idealism and frequent failings. These pictures see all but judge not.

Joel Sternfeld entwines two personal stories in this book that together reveal the roots and evolution of color theory in his work over the past five decades. In the summer of 1975, facing surgery with a risk of paralysis, Sternfeld went in search of a last idyll-and found it in Nags Head on North Carolina's Outer Banks. From June to August he photographed the seaside town floating in time, capturing a dreamlike sense of solace. Sternfeld's images show beachgoers of all ages in various scenes of leisure and recreation in this, his first body of work addressing a season. At the time, Sternfeld was already committed to color as the basis of photographic expression and fascinated by Josef Albers' Interaction of Color: "Any time that I saw a color phenomenon in the landscape that somehow coincided with an Albers-type exercise in the perceptual properties of color, I made a photograph."Yet this summer sojourn was tragically broken by the death of Sternfeld's brother; the photographer returned to New York, never to go back to Nags Head. Eventually Sternfeld resumed working and one day headed to Rockaway Beach, Queens. Here he took a picture in which "All at once the ugly scene appeared beautiful to me"-the hues of sand, apartments and sky fused into a cohesive whole: finally, content had been transcended through color. This photo, made in despair and with its perceptual foundation in the Nags Head series, would lead, a few years later, to the color structures of Sternfeld's magnum opus American Prospects, his ambitious realization of what he had always wanted to do: follow the seasons across America.

In one of his last acts as mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani signed an order permitting the High Line, that beloved elevated railroad ruin which snaked down the west side of Manhattan, to be torn down. Everyone who had managed to climb up onto the High Line loved it: the wildflowers growing through disused tracks, the birds that followed the path north in spring, and south again in fall-that rural feeling magically flowing through the city like an unbidden river. Who didn't love the High Line? Those who owned the land beneath it and longed to erect high-rise buildings on the site, if only the High Line wasn't blocking their way. And so when Giuliani signed that order, the Friends of the High Line, the small community organization led by Robert Hammond and Joshua David, sprang into legal action, seeking an injunction.For over a year, Joel Sternfeld had already been photographing this hidden jewel in every season, so New Yorkers could visually climb up and see it too. In October 2001, while the rubble of the World Trade Center was still smoldering, Gerhard Steidl accepted Sternfeld's urgent request to make a book and flew to New York: together they designed Walking the High Line and just seven weeks later it was delivered, a vision for the wildly successful park that today hosts over two million visitors a year. Now in a new edition with nine additional photos, a larger format and an updated timeline, this is the book that made walking the High Line possible.

Over a period of fifteen years the author travelled across America and took portrait photographs that form an interpretive sampling of what Americans looked like at the century's end. In this book, the author's subjects are uncannily normal: a banker having an evening meal, a teenager collecting shopping carts in a parking lot, among others.

In 1969 Sternfeld began working with a 35 mm camera and Kodachrome film. This title contains works from this time until 1980. It develops traits that appear in his mature work: irony, a politicised view of America, concern for the social condition.

As Paris and its shopping arcades were to the 19th Century, Dubai and its wondrous malls may be to the new millennium. In this work, the author 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.