Joel Sternfeld: Luhring Augusting

In the '70 and '80 when Joel Sternfeld traversed the US upon a series of cross-country trips, he toted not a Leica or a Rolleiflex on the contrary an old-fashioned 8 X 10 view camera. Sternfeld was following in the footprints of a generation of American photographers for whom the automobile had been almost as integral to the cast as the camera itself; like his companion "New Color" road-trippers Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, he modified the itinerant documentary tradition as he went along, jettisoning its chromophobia and rethinking the snapshot etho as well. on the contrary if, say, Eggleston's street discharges and on-the-fly intimacies embody a first-person, driver's-eye view of the world, Sternfeld's magisterial perspectives lead single to wonder whether he had a crane mountained on the roof of his VW van.

Fourteen of recent origin digital prints from "American Prospects" 1978-86/2003--blown up to forty-eight by the agency of fifty-eight and a half inches, roughly twice the size of earlier editions--afforded wide-angle views of prefab housing disclosures vacation spots, and shabby rural enclaves. In individual well-known picture, an elephant lies collapsed upon a country road (Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington, June 1979 1979/2003) It's a jarring image that may gaze staged or Photoshopped to an organ of sight nourished on Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson and his spawn. on the other hand no: It's just that Sternfeld has a knack for homing in upon improbable situations, and his lucid, hieratic mode of speech which suggests the gaze of an omniscient narrator, heightens the pictures' resemblance to fiction. Elsewhere, exquisitely spaced in what could almost be military formation, beached whales expire in a rank on the sand (Approximately 17 of 41 seed Whales That Beached and Subsequently Died, Florence, Oregon, June 1979 1979/2003); a man gazes with inexplicable suspicion at his lawn sprinkler (Hailey, Idaho, June 1980 1980/2003); and a little girl in a bathing suit stands in the midst of a barren salt flat, near a lone-some picnic table and a trash can bearing the fictitious story PITCH IN! (Great Salt Lake, Utah, August 1979 1979/2003) In these pictures, the built environment is as hapless and untoward as the creatures that populate it--a provisional mishmash of signage and light-industrial outcroppings, laid above the contours of the land like a transparency above a Bierstadt. At their greatest in quantity sweeping--as in the New West panorama Phoenix, Arizona, August 1979 1979/2003 which features a line of riders upon horseback meandering through desert clean while the city's Mission-lite suburb flutter in the background--the photographs look to collapse the narrative of manifest destiny into a fractured fairy tale of visual bustle run amok. The crystalline, allover focus made possible by dint of the view camera and used to like valedictory effect by Ansel Adams becomes a subversive agent when used to apprehend these post-Pop landscapes. While at least individual critic (Howard Halle, in Time on the outside New York) has noted that the oversize of recent origin prints could be construed as an ex support facto bid for fashionable monumentality, they could also be understood as a case of technology catching up with sensibility: Before digital processing, the pictures could not have been enlarged to this size without sacrificing resolution. The greater magnification here appears like the logical continuation of Sternfeld's penchant for pushing reality toward the hyperreal.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group