The Brooklyn Rail

Joel Sternfeld has been photographing the American landscape for nearly half a century. When his seminal book, American Prospects, was first published in 1987, it was immediately recognized as a significant achievement. Not only was Sternfeld expanding the possibilities for color photography, his work revealed the character of a nation as it edged into a new, technological era. On the occasion of American Prospects going on view at the Bruce Museum, Sternfeld joined art historian Geoffrey Batchen on the New Social Environment (Episode #1121). In their conversation, edited for print, Sternfeld talks about what it means to travel with the seasons, how he thinks about color, and the influence of Paul Klee on his sense of aesthetics.

Geoffrey Batchen (Rail): Joel, I thought we might just talk in general for a moment about The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, March 1979 (1979) as a kind of exemplar of your work, before we move on to more detailed discussions about influences and interests. In your own writing about your work, you talk about moving through space, seeing something that looks like it’s going to be a good picture, and then you say, “I make a photograph.” I thought we might start by talking about what “I make a photograph” means for you. I assume that, in the first instance, it means you make an exposure on a piece of film in the back of a camera. But already, certain decisions have been made, and in this case, part of that decision is you decided to shoot that picture with an 8x10 camera.

Joel Sternfeld: I think you’re asking two or three or more questions, but I’ll try to explain the “decisions that have already been made” aspect of your question—and then “why the 8x10.”

American Prospects had an extremely long foreground going all the way back to my childhood interests, but its recent long foreground was a body of work entitled “Rush Hour” made in summer of 1976.

These were street pictures born in a period of sadness and recovery from surgery, for me—but also out of a bicentennial amidst a severe economic downturn.

As a child, I had read the books of Edwin Way Teale, a nature writer. He and his wife would start in Florida in late January, and they would proceed north at the rate of roughly fifteen miles a day, stopping off at places where the season was particularly manifest. They’d arrive in northern Maine, sometime in late June, and then they’d write about what they saw along the way. I read the nature writers avidly. I read Henry David Thoreau, I read John Burroughs. I particularly liked Henry Beston, who spent a year in a little shack at the end of Cape Cod and followed a cycle of the year.

It was the street pictures that I submitted for the Guggenheim Foundation—and to my great surprise, I received a fellowship. My whole outlook improved. I decided to do what I had always wanted to do, and that was to follow the seasons across America.

When I was a child there were print copies of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the playroom (both my parents were artists) and the Bruegels depicting seasonal activity had a strong influence on me. So this idea of following the cycle of the year was with me. I decided I was going to travel with the seasons: start in New England, come south through the Appalachians, cross the southern tier of the United States into the winter, and follow the spring north on the West Coast. It was kind of a crazy decision. It was one of those things you think you can do when you’re young: cover the whole country in a beat up Volkswagen with bald tires and forty dollars in your pocket and a bag of sunflower seeds. But that’s what I was doing.

Rail: How did you know when to stop that Volkswagen and get out all the gear?

Sternfeld: Well, let me further situate you in this decision process. If this is going to be your once in a lifetime opportunity to follow your dream, you don’t want to describe it with a little 35 millimeter camera. You want to describe it with the best possible means available, and in the world of photography that’s 8x10. I could afford two negatives a day that entire first year. So, if you’ve got two negatives a day, you’ve got to know quite clearly in advance what you’re interested in, in broad measure. So, I storyboarded the year, if you will. It wasn’t storyboarding in a pictorial sense. It was storyboarding in terms of what I wanted to say, what my sense of urgency about the United States at that moment was. You could call it ideational storyboarding. And it was extremely complex. There were fifty, sixty, ninety, or more factors.

On the morning that I woke up in Austin, Texas, and heard on the radio that the space shuttle had taken off from Arizona and was going to land at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base outside of San Antonio, I took off. It was six o’clock in the morning, and I made it there by nine o’clock in the morning. I knew this was interesting because one point of my thesis had to do with the older America of the Northeast—what Calvin Trillin has called the “ancien” region of the United States—and the New America, high-tech California: the other America that was being born.

If you’ll indulge me, I’ll tell you a story. Tell me if you want me to cut it short, but I think it’s a revelatory story about what it was like to travel in America in those days.

Rail: Of course.

Sternfeld: So, I started hurrying down the road with about thirty pounds of equipment on my back, in a backpack, and carrying a big, heavy tripod. And when I got to the gate of the base and realized that I’d forgotten the one credential I had: a letter from the Guggenheim Foundation, written in very formal, arcane language. And there’s a private at the gate. And I gushed at him, “Look, I forgot my Guggenheim letter, but I’ve got to get up on the roof of that building over there.” And the private takes me to a sergeant, and the sergeant takes me to a lieutenant, lieutenant to a colonel, and finally they get to the general. And I had nothing. I had extremely long hair, and I was bedraggled, because I slept in the van twenty-nine nights out of thirty. And I get to the general, and I make my plea, and he bellows to the private who is still with me, “Take this guy up to the roof of that building!” And that’s how I got up there and made this picture.

Rail: It wouldn’t happen like that today, Joel. [Laughs] So, I’m interested in what happens when you use a camera like this. For a start, everything in American Prospects, and almost all your work, I think, is a horizontal rectangle. Even without the camera, do you see the world in horizontal rectangles now, always in terms of potential pictures?

Sternfeld: No, I don’t. I have no particular commitment to the horizontal, except I have perceived myself to be a landscapist, and historically, if you’re a landscapist, you’re horizontal. I will say that in the Western tradition the vertical is considered the sacred dimension. I guess I’m not too sacred, but there’s a little bit of it in me.

Rail: Okay. So, you only had a couple of sheets of negative film to use per day. Does that mean you only made a single exposure for this work?

Sternfeld: I don’t know. I probably made one or two others. You know, initially that sounds like a formula: one negative in the morning and one negative in the evening. But the number of things that can go wrong with 8x10, both in the making of the photograph and in the processing of the film, are ten times more than with 35 millimeter film, so eventually you develop a hierarchy of what’s interesting, what’s important. This was such a first in human history and that’s where your storyboarding comes in. I knew this was an important situation, and I knew this was an extremely technically difficult picture to make. I probably chanced several negatives, because to hold depth of field from five feet to one-hundred yards away is hard, but to have moving people and stop them? 8x10 has not been known as a camera that can depict action. And one of the things I am still proud of with American Prospects is this technique of getting up high, starting the picture twenty, thirty, forty feet away and being able to stop action. I think that’s become common coin now, but at the time that I was doing it, it was not. It was the God’s-eye-view, with action, the Bruegel view photographically achieved.

Rail: The other striking element, of course, is that the photograph happens to be in color. Once you’ve got a negative, what is the creative process that occurs between the exposure of the negative and the print that we finally see? How much intervention do you make as an artist at that point, what kind of decision making takes place? I’m sure that, at that stage, you’re making various decisions about color, for example. You do have some creative control over how that color is going to appear in the final print. And there’s also the question of size. These are issues that we tend to take for granted, but I’m interested in your actual decision-making process as you’re working from a negative.

Sternfeld: There’s very little decisioning in the pictures except to make a point that is as true to life as it can be. There were decisions about the type of film, the lens, and the printing methodology, but you’d have to know my grand thesis about color to understand why these decisions were made.

First of all, size has always been a difficult issue because, with 8x10, there are details that are absolutely wonderful to behold, but unless you blow things up really large, you can’t see them. So, you want to make a big print. Although, at the time that I was first exhibiting this work, big prints were a rarity. With big prints, every time you take one across town, you need a truck and four people. So, there’s a trade-off between what the 8x10 negative will facilitate and what’s pragmatic in terms of having the work viewed. When I was traveling, I sometimes thought about attaching a magnifying glass on a string to every frame.

Rail: In your mind, what’s the ideal size, if you could manage it?

Sternfeld: That’s like asking what’s the best cheese. It depends on the image and the other intentionality of the body of work. For me, the highest moment in art is a unity of form and content. In this instance of America being the content, perhaps a large size would be ideal, because we tend to think of America as a grand country. That’s part of our mythology of America. So grand prints might provide a unity of form and content. For a different body of work, a small print could provide that unity. So, I don’t think the question can be answered in the abstract.

Rail: You mentioned adopting the 8x10 as your camera of choice, at least for this project. One thing about using a handheld camera is that it always seems to have a relationship to the body of the photographer, and then perhaps also to the body of the viewer. But in work shot with an 8x10, you feel like you’re floating in space somehow, in the sense of the way the picture positions you in front of it. I wonder if that directs the way you frame or compose your picture, especially in the case of Space Shuttle Columbia, where the viewer has a surrogate for themselves in the foreground looking out over the same scene.

Sternfeld: Well, I think I did have ideal framing, but I don’t think it had anything to do with the camera per se. After some period of time, you become quite fluid with the 8x10. I know my lens and I know my point of view in a body of work, which is different in every body of work and is dependent on very nuanced considerations. For example, in American Prospects I had an impulse to get up high, to take the God’s-eye viewpoint, which has been a landscapist’s impulse ever since Joachim Patinir. In On This Site, which examines violence in America, I wanted to be closer to the ground and to my subject matter because we tend to think of proximate things as “ours.” With the 8x10, I can set up in a minute. That includes walking to the ideal spot and setting up the camera, soup to nuts. It becomes really a part of you, and it doesn’t take very long to set it up and make a picture.

Rail: One of the other things that strikes me, Joel, when I look at this photograph, and through the book in general: another effect of the choice of color, especially in the late seventies, when it was still a relatively new aspect of the art photography scene, is that, on the one hand, the photograph encourages us to look through it, if you like, at the subject matter—space vehicle, people in the middle ground, a figure in the foreground. But then one’s eye is drawn back to the surface of the print, and you start to notice the way you’ve organized things. For example, there’s the three bands of horizontal form that organize this particular photograph, and then the vertical of the man that subtends the three of them. The foreground is sort of nothingness, and then the middle ground is crowded with ant-like figures, and then we have the blankness of the sky. In other words, there’s a strange kind of push-pull in the photograph itself, where it asks me to look through it, into it, and then back to the surface to notice the various formal elements of it. As you’re taking photographs, are you thinking about that, or is this just a happenstance of the way you work?

Sternfeld: Truly, I don’t understand the question—by “bands of horizontal form,” do you mean as line or as color?

If the latter, then I can say that there is an essential problem to the photograph in color—and that is that we see the world in color all the time. Black-and-white photography is instantly and inherently abstract, whereas the photograph in color is not, and so it becomes the task of the photographer working in color to build in some kind of abstraction if the photograph is ever to achieve some level of transcendence.

This is a complicated matter; it occurs in many, many different ways. In Space Shuttle Columbia and in every photograph in American Prospects, there is a formal means to that end.

In the years before American Prospects, I studied Josef Albers. I looked at ideas of the interaction of color as it naturally occurred in the landscape. So if you’re seeing three broad planes and a push-pull effect, it comes out of the application of Albers and of other Bauhaus theories.

Rail: I’d like to move into talking about your photograph, Washington, D.C., August 1974 (1974). We’ve been discussing in part what color does to a photograph, and what the choice of shooting in color does for a photographer. In this case, we’re moving backwards a little bit in time, where you’re still using a handheld camera, but you’ve decided you’re going to shoot in color. Could you talk about that, Joel?

Sternfeld: Well, from the very first roll of film that I ever made, I knew I had a question. I knew that I was a landscapist or at least someone vitally interested in nature, in particular the changing of the seasons. I could go on and on about it. I grew peas behind the garage at age three; I was a bird watcher; I wanted to be a farmer. I knew that I was a landscapist at heart, so when I turned to photography, the question was, could I express seasonality and landscape in black-and-white? And in a surprisingly organized way, I went out with a tripod and two cameras and made the same scene in black-and-white and in color in several instances, and I made the decision that I needed the color. I don’t know if I would say that’s the right decision now. There are photographers, particularly Robert Adams or Frank Gohlke, who make black-and-white pictures that give me such a seasonal feeling. There’s no Robert Adams picture that I don’t have a visceral response to. But I made the decision to work in color.

There was no one ahead of me. I didn’t get to meet William Eggleston until 1974. I didn’t go into the back room of Light Gallery and see those 8x10 contacts by Stephen Shore that staggered me until 1974. I was working on my own, and I was wrestling with what the highest and best use of the photograph in color could be. Eventually, I came up with a formulation for myself that went something like, “in the good or successful color photograph, the definition or the meaning of the picture will somehow arise through the use of color.” So, when I was driving down a street in Washington, DC in August, 1974, and I saw this couple going the other way, and I saw that she had bothered to get sunglasses that just about matched their 1957 turquoise Thunderbird, I made an immediate U-turn and pulled up at a red light next to them and made this picture. For me, this is a successful color photograph in that the meaning of the picture, their relationship to each other, their relationship to the car, is somehow explicated by the color of her sunglasses.

In those years, I was looking for other answers to the photograph in color, and all the painters that I knew were working out of Albers’s color theory. I mean, there are lots of other color theories. There’s nothing about Albers’s ideas that preclude other color theories. But anytime I saw an Albers exercise naturally occurring in the landscape, I made a picture. The question is, to what avail? Well, the avail might be, for example, that I never would have made a picture like Location unknown, (#1) (date unknown), except I was interested in how that green interacts with the red of the wall, how it interacts with the brownishness of this tree. So in that sense, Albers helped me to see color where I might not see it otherwise, to see how colors were operating. But it didn’t lead to any generalized notion. It was very interesting to do, but not at all an answer in and of itself.

Rail: That’s interesting, because when you’re thinking like this—you’ve got a certain understanding of color, you’re trying to bend photography to the will of that color theory—it raises the question: what is this photograph about? Let’s take, for example, Location unknown, (#1). At first glance, you might be tempted to think, well, it doesn’t seem to be about anything of great significance, except for these relationships that you’ve set up in the frame of the camera.

Sternfeld: Not true. Because look, there are these formal relationships, these chromatic relationships, but it’s also about winter and summer. The trees are bare, the tennis court we associate with summer. So, it does have its own seasonal moment to it. And it maybe says something about the contemporary world, because the tennis court is artificial nature. And it has something to do with exclusion. Outside the fence there’s debris, and within the tennis court, it’s all clean, and maybe that’s the tennis whites compared to the rest of us plebeians who aren’t playing tennis. So, there is content here. My interest is never formal per se.

Rail: Okay. Maybe then we can move to talking about a work you shot in New York in 1976, “Rush Hour.”

Sternfeld: Well, in the summer of 1975 I went down to Nags Head, North Carolina. I was facing some surgery that could have left me paralyzed from the shoulders downward. In the middle of summer, I had to go back to New York because of a death in the family, but in January of 1976 I had the surgery, and in the period of recovery, I wanted to work. I couldn’t move very quickly at all, but again, I was doing these Albers exercises, without knowing why.

Rail: You told me previously you were actually shooting on slide film for these pictures. And there’s obviously a complicated process getting from slide film to print and the various adjustments you have to make to retain the color that you want.

Sternfeld: It takes a few steps. First, you make an inter negative, which in this case means I take a 35-millimeter slide and expose it onto a piece of negative film, and then print from that negative. There’s no particular artistry involved. It’s just something you do. It’s not revelatory, I don’t think.

I sought the same color exercise in the photograph of the people wearing the pink and gray suits, New York City (#2) (1976) and additionally I was aware of H.L. Mencken’s notion that every age has its own characteristic color scheme. Mencken had this odd conception about the period from when Lincoln was shot until the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893: he called that the brown period. Certainly the sixties and the seventies were a Day-Glo period. So when I saw a couple coming down Madison Avenue, I wasn’t interested in who they were or what they represented, but I wanted that Day-Glo, because I thought that was representative of the time, and they were a walking Albers exercise.

There’s also a sense of urgency and anxiety in the “Rush Hour” work. The Watergate era was still fresh in memory. The Vietnam War was still fresh in memory. There was an economic recession, and a lot of these pictures are fairly angsty.

Rail: You have spoken about a kind of national malaise.

Sternfeld: Well, the phrase is often ascribed to Jimmy Carter. Actually, he didn’t use that word, but in the summer of 1979, he made a speech about the moral crisis in America, and that became known as the malaise speech. I note this because I think that to the extent that American Prospects has relevance now, it may be because from that moment of Reagan being elected, there’s been a more or less unbroken line of cultural and social change of conservatism, politically and socially. I didn’t know when I did American Prospects that this would continue, but I saw it happening. It was something I was attuned to.

Rail: Rockaway Beach, New York City (#2), August 1975 (1975) is quite a crucial picture, I think, for you.

Sternfeld: I came back to New York from Nags Head in the summer of 1975 because of that death in the family. One day I went to the beach to walk. I’m phobic about large buildings by the sea, and I thought this scene was as ugly as it gets. It was really hell to me. And it was that type of August day when the summer’s over, and it’s not even the dog days, it’s worse. But I looked up, and it’s mawkish to tell, but I was crying—not over the scene, over family matters—and I looked up. And all of a sudden—there’s a Japanese notion of clear seeing in a clear light, the doors of perception opening. And the doors of perception opened for me at that moment. I took a picture, thinking there was something there, and then I more or less put it away. But when I received that Guggenheim fellowship in 1978, I was absolutely galvanized. You know, here I had the opportunity of a lifetime. I had a sabbatical from teaching. What was I going to do? And I went through all of my old pictures, and I asked myself which one was a paradigm. And oddly enough, this one came up. And I started to analyze it. What was it about this picture that made it the best? And I began to think of Paul Klee and of his View of Kairouan (1914). Klee organized many of his pictures with two or three dominant hues of relatively equal density, and I started to think about that as an aesthetic for this entire body of work that would come. I was trying to make something transcendent, and I started to think of this color system of two or three pastel hues of equal density and no primaries as transporting, but I also thought of Mencken, and I thought this was appropriate to the America I was about to describe. Starbucks and fast food was starting to appear in the countryside; mass chains of motels were appearing; high tech was appearing in California and elsewhere. There was a new sort of pseudo-sophistication, a slight Europeanization of the American experience. And this seemed like a palette that might provide a unity of form and content. If you look at Canyon Country, California, June 1983 (1983), you can see that I’m working with that. That work has somewhat the same palette as the Paul Klee, in the broadest sense. So that became a formal device that I followed quite rigorously in American Prospects: two or three dominant hues of equal density.

You asked when I would get out the camera. On a sunny day with contrasty light? Almost never. But when I had light that facilitated it—you can’t achieve this chromatic equality unless you’ve got light that facilitates it. So, as I traveled and followed the seasons and tried to say what I wanted to say about America, I also had to wait for the light, and that really guided me.

Rail: Why did you need figures in Canyon Country? You’ve been talking about yourself as a landscape photographer, and you’re talking about Klee and color theory, and yet in this work you have these two figures. One of the things that struck me when I was looking closely at this picture is the way the man looks directly into the camera, and therefore directly at us, but the girl is looking off over your shoulder to some distant horizon. And there’s something about that too, that the youth in the picture is looking beyond the present, and the guy is looking so directly at us. I wonder if that played into your new America ethos as well? Maybe it’s just one of those happy accidents that occurs at the moment of exposure.

Sternfeld: Why did I need the figures? Because I was interested in them. I walked down this cul-de-sac, and there was almost no one out. It was the third year of travel on American Prospects, and I was starting to turn my attention to the American people. Although I didn’t know what it would be called, I knew that Stranger Passing was coming as a companion body of work: American Prospects being the landscape, Stranger Passing being the American people. So, I was feeling that tendency to begin describing the American people, and they were almost the only people out, and the light was good. And so, here’s the whole matrix: the light was good, the situation was good, and I was very much interested in updating the tradition of “portrait in the landscape” a la Thomas Gainsborough. And they looked like new America in a way, so I asked to photograph them.

Rail: I’d like to close by talking about one of your best-known pictures, After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California, July 1979 (1979). I presume you knew there was a landslide and you found a way to get your camera in the right place to capture it in all of its drama. But it also seems to be an allegory of exactly this malaise, or this struggle between nature and the American Dream that comes up regularly in American Prospects.

Sternfeld: Precisely. I was in Los Angeles, and I heard that there had been flash flooding in Rancho Mirage, which is some 120 miles east. So, I drove out to Rancho Mirage, and again, this is a story that illustrates what it was like to travel in America in those days. It’s 120 degrees in Rancho Mirage when I arrive and humid, the Volkswagen has absolutely no air conditioning, I’ve got film that is sensitive to heat, and all the power is out. So I went into the local firehouse, which had an emergency generator and air conditioning, and I asked the firemen if I could store my film for the day at the firehouse. They were quite willing, and in fact, they Xeroxed maps of the area to show me where the “good damage” was. I came back late that night and they asked me if I had seen the TransAm down the ravine. And I actually didn’t know what a TransAm was, and I said no. Bob Hope Drive was closed, Bing Crosby Drive was closed. And so, they said, “Oh, you’ve gotta see this.” They put me on the fire truck like a little kid up top, and they drove out to the scene at night with the lights flashing, and they shone a searchlight on the scene. And the truth of the matter is, I still didn’t know what was so wonderful about it, but I thought, if they’re excited, I better be excited. So, I spent the next three hours on a payphone trying to get permission from the head of the Salvation Army, which had control over the disaster zone. Finally, about midnight or one o’clock in the morning, I got permission. I slept in the van in a supermarket parking lot for about four hours, and then I got up at about 5 o’clock in the morning. This also relates to your previous questions about what dictates when you get out the tripod, when you get out the film. If you look carefully, you can see that the sun is just coming over the mountains, and I knew that I needed to be there before that happened to get equal density in the lighting and in the color of the scene. So, I made the picture. And, you know, honestly, I didn’t know why they were so excited, but it fit within this broader sense that I had—that by the late 1970s there was something amiss in America.

When I set out on those three years of travel I knew I wanted to make some pictures that positioned humankind within a larger context. The TransAm down the ravine seemed like it might serve as a metaphor for that idea.

But all this is a huge simplification of a far more complex process. An old adage would have it: “Art defies characterization by language.” This interview serves as a reminder of that notion.

Rail: Thank you, Joel.