JOEL STERNFELD | American Prospects - first edition

First edition, second printing of Sternfeld’s quintessential first book featuring 53 color photographs. 

Venture forth on an American journey with Sternfeld's discerning lens as your guide. His seminal work "American Prospects" is a visual odyssey across this vast land, a daring wandering to uncover the unexplored vistas and hidden truth of our nation's terrain. Sternfeld's pioneering artistic vision transforms the seemingly routine into profound statements about our culture, environment, and societal landscape. From sun-drenched landscapes to eerily vacant utopias, each transcendent image will shake you from the slumber of the commonplace to awaken a profound realization - that the undiscovered majesty of America has been here all along. Take this evocative volume as your road map, and let its seductive scenery beckon you toward your own America.

Selected for both “The Book of 101 Books” by Andrew Roth (p.260-261) and “The Photobook : A History - Volume 2” (p. 34-35)

Martin Parr and Gerry Badger write in “The Photobook” :

“..... in American Prospects, each picture suggests an arcane drama being played out -an elephant stranded on a road in Oregon, or a pumpkin stall in Virginia behind which a house burns fiercely. These narrative hints are suggestive, sly, often ironic, frequently mysterious, making American Prospects less a series of photographs than a series of tales - unfinished, elliptical certainly - that add up to a cogent and persuasive view of America, told with affection but also conveying the feeling that something is not quite right.” (p. 34-35)

Page edges have minor toning. Jacket’s spine is faded/sunned. Jacket is pretty price-clipped. Jacket also has corner creases, rubbing, edge wear, scratches, and one inch closed tear to corner. Fine book in acceptable jacket. Good + overall.

From the dust jacket flap :
“American Prospects is a startling visual chronicle. Over a period of eight years, Joel Sternfeld crisscrossed this country in a Volkswagen camper and brought back photographs that surprise us with their wit and discovery.

In these brilliant pictures, accompanied by two essays--one from photography critic Andy Grundberg and another from Anne Tucker, curator of photography at Houston's Museum of Fine Arts--the cumulative meaning of Sternfeld's work is revealed. Sternfeld shows us a landscape that is both mundane and exalted.

A fireman shops for pumpkins as a house burns down; a basketball hoop stands abandoned near the Grand Canyon: the photographs of American Prospects are at once familiar and disconcerting. In pictures of deserted buildings and declining mill towns, Sternfeld points out the certainty of change with his own discerning eye. Anne Tucker writes, "He has found beauty in atypical places... His audiences are asked to pay attention to details habitually unnoticed." Sternfeld's photographs are deceptively simple; they say: look below the surface. What we find is often unexpected.

Andy Grundberg observes in his introduction that "Sternfeld's photographs speak of a time when progress lost its sense of inevitability, when the land lost its last pretense to innocence, when the spirit of individualism flickered for want of fresh air. They also speak of nature's restorative powers, of human goodness, of men and women seeking to accommodate their primal needs to the imperatives of technological society."

12.25 x 10.25 inches