Joel Sternfeld - First Pictures - 2011

Best known for his important photobooks On This Site and American Prospects (see Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook Vol 2 pp.34-35) Joel Sternfeld is one of the most influential photographers in the development and acceptance of colour within documentary photography during the 1970s. This very rare book is of his largely unseen early colour work.

His early work shows the influence of William Eggleston, whom he met in 1974 while he was teaching in Harvard. In her illuminating essay for First Pictures, Jessica May notes that Sternfeld was struck by "Eggleston's absolute mastery … of the poetic snapshot" but was also inspired to react against it. "Thus," writes May, "the question that came to animate Sternfeld's own practice pushed in the opposite direction – how to make photographs, individual and in sequence, that could speak not words or even phrases, but sentences, paragraphs, stories."

Joel Sternfeld is best known for large-format color photographs that extend the tradition of chronicling roadside America initiated by Walker Evans in the 1930s. Sternfeld's projects have consistently explored the possibility of a collective American identity by documenting ordinary people and places throughout the country. Each project he embarks on is bound by a concept that imbues it with subtle irony, often through insightful visual juxtapositions or by pairing images with informational text. Another characteristic aspect of Sternfeld's work is that color is never arbitrary; it functions in highly sophisticated ways to connect elements and resonate emotion.

In 1969 Sternfeld began working with a 35mm camera and Kodachrome film, and First Pictures contains works between that time and 1980. Concentrating on the with utopic and dystopic possibilities of the American experience through examining the man altered landscape, Sternfeld develops traits that appear in his mature work: irony, a politicized view of America and concern for the social condition. But there are also pictures that bear little relation to his later work: colour arrangements that parallel those of Eggleston, as well as street photography which Sternfeld ceased making in 1976. The photographs in First Pictures were made at a time when colour photography was struggling to assert itself against the authoritative black and white tradition, making this book a revelation both in Sternfeld’s oeuvre and in the history of contemporary photography. A major figure in the photography world, Joel Sternfeld has received numerous awards including two Guggenheim fellowships, a Prix de Rome and the Citibank Photography Award.

This stunning first edition photobook from Steidl, including a tipped in plate on the front cover, is an important record of a master of contemporary photography's early work.

Condition:
Very good first edition copy of this fantastic photobook from one of the most influential American photographers. Small amount of edgewear to corners of spine and edge of cover. Crease to blank last page. Please examine listing photographs carefully.