The American Prospects of 1965's Joel Sternfeld
Time recently described photographer Joel Sternfeld '65 as an "emerging American master." The New York Times calls his work "both powerful and disturbing." Such reviews, while quite rare, seem even more exceptional when one learns the artist was a Dartmouth economics major and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's law school.
Sternfeld says he was in his second year of legal studies when a girlfriend suggested photography as an alternative to the low quality of his work as an amateur painter. As soon as the first roll of film was developed Joel knew he was "hooked." Not knowing "how one went about becoming a photographer," he simply went on taking pictures while continuing school.
After graduation from Penn Joel found an innovative college, Stockton State in Pomona, N.J., where he was not only hired to teach environmental law but also allowed to offer a course in photography. Gradually his career transition became complete and Joel became the school's full-time photography instructor. His first major show was at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts in 1975, and in 1978 he was awarded the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships. This funding allowed him to begin a series of cross-country travels and to develop the unique use of a tripodmounted eight-by-ten-inch camera for capturing the details of our contemporary American landscape.
Joel is now serving as a professor of photography at Sarah Lawrence College after having held a similar position at Yale. During the fall term of 1985 he was artist-inresidence at Dartmouth. Joel describes his return to Hanover as "an absolute dream working with students on an informal basis while at the same time being allowed to follow the directions you felt were most constructive to your career." Joel next plans to take a year off while he travels to record his visual impressions of Kenya, Tanzania, and Senegal.
In April of this year a major exhibition of Joel's work opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, with later appearances scheduled for Detroit and Baltimore. The title of the show, "American Prospects," is also the name of a newly released volume of Sternfeld's photographs (Times Books). An example from this work is shown here. People describes the artistry in Joel's book as coming from a point where land and people meet in continuing contests of will, where "nature and man are well-matched lover/combatants, proud, resourceful, stubborn, dumb, funny, and mysterious." It is hard to ignore such an encomium.
Near Lake Powell, Arizona, August 1979.
