Joel Sternfeld Stranger Passing
The Buchmann Galerie is pleased to present an exhibition comprised of two separate but related bodies of work by Joel Sternfeld: Stranger Passing and To Joseph Palmer. Both are works of photographic portraits and both use a collective grouping of individual portraits to describe a larger aspect of American society.
The semiformal portraits of Stranger Passing were made between 1985 and 2001 in the United States. In these large (92 x 116 cm) pictures we see a very wide range of American types going about their daily lives. Taking his inspiration from the German portraitist August Sander, and in particular from Sander’s Three Peasants On Their Way to a Dance, Sternfeld captures his subjects in the midst of an activity that seems to give a clue to their identity. Commenting on the work in the catalogue of Stranger Passing as presented at San Francisco MOMA in 2001 curator Douglas Nickel wrote: “Sternfeld’s sociology therefore throws the question back at us, asking us to decide what we are willing to assume, on the basis of outward appearance, about the person standing next to us in the elevator.” Further commenting on Sternfeld’s portraits Nickel says: “Depending on where you stand, they can be taken as critical, ironic, and political, or earnest, straight-faced, and illustrative.” In these pictures the seeds of much what is transpiring in present day America can be seen taking hold.
At Buchmann Box we are showing To Joseph Palmer for the first time. This most recent series is comprised of 24 small, jewel-like portraits of people with beards — but it is not the beards per se that are the focus of this work. The pictures are dedicated to Joseph Palmer, a nineteenth century New England farmer who grew a long and flowing beard at a time when beards were utterly socially unacceptable.
Attacked one night by four men attempting to cut off his beard, Palmer defended himself with a knife. For this he was jailed and given a ten dollar fine. Refusing to pay the fine as a matter of principle he spent the next 15 months in jail. During this time he wrote to the local newspaper and his published letters made him a cause célèbre. Upon his release from prison Palmer became part of the social circle around Thoreau and Emerson and he joined the radical and spectacularly unsuccessful commune, Fruitlands. By the time Palmer died in the 1870’s beards had become wildly in fashion. On Palmer’s tombstone a likeness of him with his great beard is sculpted in marble and we are told that he was “Persecuted For Wearing the Beard”.
A historic text written by Stewart Holbrook in 1944 runs sequentially at the bottom of Sternfeld’s images, thus making this another work in the many text/image bodies of work that he has continued to create (On This Site (exhibited at Buchmann Galerie in 2009), Treading on Kings, When it Changed, Sweet Earth).
Each participant in To Joseph Palmer was told the story of this crusader for freedom of speech and each agreed to participate in the project to honor Palmer and the right of all people to be free of persecution because of their harmless beliefs and practices.
For more information about the artist and for images you are welcome to contact the gallery at any time.
Joel Sternfeld
Born 1944, lives and works in New York.
Dartmouth College
2004 | Citigroup Photography Prize, in association with The Photographer’s Gallery |
1990-91 | Prix de Rome |
1987-88 | Shifting Foundation Fellowship |
1985 | Dartmouth College, Artist-in-Resident Grand Prize Winner, Higashikawa Festival of Photography, Japan |
1978, 1982 | Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship |
1980 | National Endowment for the Arts Photographers Fellowship |
Dallas Art Museum
Deutsche Börse Art Collection, Frankfurt/M.
European American Bank, New York
Folkwang Museum, Essen
Forbes Collection, New York, NY
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
Groninger Museum, Groningen, The Netherlands
Goldman Sachs, New York
F.C. Gundlach Collection, Hamburg
Hallmark Collections, Kansas City
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Houston Museum of Modern Art
ING Belgium Art Collection
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN
Maison Europeene de la Photographie, Paris
Museum Folkwang Essen, Essen, Germany
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Seattle Art Museum
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, CA
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Yale University Art Gallery, New York