Joel Sternfeld


Joel Sternfeld is an American fine-art color photographer. He is noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and helping establish color photography as a respected artistic medium.
Sternfeld's work is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Life and work

Sternfeld earned a BA from Dartmouth College and teaches photography at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He began taking color photographs in 1970 after learning the color theory of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. Color is an important element of his photographs.
American Prospects is Sternfeld's most known book and explores the irony of human-altered landscapes in the United States. To make the book, Sternfeld photographed ordinary things, including unsuccessful towns and barren-looking landscapes.
On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam, is about violence in America. Sternfeld photographed sites of recent tragedies. Next to each photograph is text about the events that happened at that location.
From 1991 to 1994 Sternfeld worked with Melinda Hunt to document New York City's public cemetery on Hart Island, resulting in the book "Hart Island".
Sternfeld has also published books about social class and stereotypes in America, an abandoned elevated railway in New York, and Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America.
When It Changed contains close-up portraits of delegates debating global warming at the 2005 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal.

Exhibitions

Sternfeld's work is held in the following public collection: