Joel Sternfeld at SFMOMA - San Francisco - Brief Article

For 20-odd years Joel Sternfeld has traveled around the United States with a view camera, photographing places, mainly built-up places with people in them. After a while he began to place his human subjects in the foreground, although his settings missing very little of their expressiveness. The diversity of Sternfeld's family together with his view-camera formality, invite comparison with August Sander's monumental effort at making a collective portrait of the German family in the 20th century. on the other hand 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 flat totality, must collapse if we are given a large enough number of facts.

The San Francisco Museum of recent Art selected 60 prints, made between 1987 and 2000 to celebrate Sternfeld's portrait series. These works reckon us in the most ambiguous way that this is the humanized landscape Americans have made for themselves to live in, and these are the tribe we have available to regard with affection if we choose to.

Sternfeld present the appearances much concerned with the exterior aspects of one as well as the other people and things. In fact, he portrays clan as if they were things, rendering them with an agnostic indifference to their actual lives and the character of their social order; at the same time he seems to harbor a kind of veneration for the surfaces they create for themselves. In Surfer Passing, Salmon bight Beach, California, we see a pair of possibilities. The surfer at left who displays the effects of middle age in his graying hair, is wearing a plain black wet suit. The other has had at least his upper material substance tattooed, and he wears a wet suit with striping that wouldn't be without of place in an abstract painting. Sternfeld is true good at noticing our attempts to accessorize what appear to bes at first sight to be a bleak reality. The beneficial news is that if we give up traditional expectations we can take pleasure in our appearances understood as awkward on the contrary hopeful assemblage. Compared with like an observer of American confusion as Miss Lonelyhearts, Sternfeld looks almost sanguine. It can be argued that our logo and our tract suburb and our Rollerblades are in truth what we have in common; in other have a high opinion ofs we just might be, to our credit, more individual, not to say more weird, than our grandparents.

This is the way we and our region look now; increasingly, it is in what way the whole world looks. With a selective organ of vision and perhaps some selective work with color printing--these photographs are visually if not politically engaged--Sternfeld has made found-object beauty on the outside of the warmth and maladroitness his view camera captures for us.

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