Joel Sternfeld at Hall Foundation, Reading, USA
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The Hall Art Foundation hosted an exhibition by Joel Sternfeld. The show featured approximately twenty of Sternfeld’s iconic large-scale color photographs from his celebrated American Prospects and Walking the High Line series, along with his 2016 video work, London Bridge.
First published in 1987, Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects helped define a new voice in color photography. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978 for his street photography, Sternfeld set out to expand his subject, driven by a desire to reconcile his vision of a classical, ordered America with a landscape increasingly shaped by technology and uniformity. Traveling the country in a Volkswagen camper with an 8 × 10 view camera between 1978 and 1984, he photographed sites where human ambition met the natural world, places altered for domestic, agricultural, industrial, or recreational use. Titled simply by location and date, the resulting images combine lush beauty, deadpan humor, and quiet unease. Today regarded as one of Sternfeld’s most influential series, American Prospects offers a complex portrait of America that remains as resonant now as when it was made.
In his later series, Walking the High Line, Sternfeld continues to explore the fragile balance between utopian and dystopian landscapes. Built in 1934 as an elevated freight railway along Manhattan’s west side, the High Line was abandoned in the 1980s and gradually reclaimed by weeds, grasses, and small trees. Drawn to this unexpected convergence of nature and city, Sternfeld spent two years hauling his 8 × 10 camera onto the tracks several times a week, documenting what he called a “hallucinatory experience of nature in the city. He embraced the High Line’s unruly growth as a form of authentic beauty, arguing that its wildness surpassed even that of America’s most celebrated national parks.
Hall Art Foundation
544 VT Route 106
Reading, VT 05062
United States