Joel Sternfeld. Stranger Passing. Over a period of fifteen years Joel Sternfeld
travelled across America and took portrait photographs that form in Douglas.
NEW REVISED EDITION
Joel Sternfeld Stranger Passing
Over a period of fifteen years Joel Sternfeld travelled across America and took portrait photographs that form in Douglas R. Nickel’s words an “intelligent, unscientific, interpretive sampling of what Americans looked like at the century’s end.” Unlike historical portraits which represent significant people in staged surroundings, Sternfeld’s subjects are uncannily “normal”: a banker having an evening meal, a teenager collecting shopping carts in a parking lot, a homeless man holding his bedding. Using August Sander’s classic photograph of three peasants on their way to a dance as a starting point, Sternfeld employed a conceptual strategy that amounts to a new theory of the portrait, which might be termed “The Circumstantial Portrait”. What happens when we encounter the other in the mist of a circumstance? What presumptions, if any, are valid? What, if anything, can be known of the other from a photographic portrait? A major figure in the photography world, Joel Sternfeld was born in New York City in 1944. He has received numerous awards including two Guggenheim fellowships, a Prix de Rome and the Citibank Photography Award. Sternfeld’s books published by Steidl include American Prospects (2003), Sweet Earth (2006), Oxbow Archive (2008), First Pictures (2011) and On This Site (2012).
Joel Sternfeld Stranger Passing Essays by Douglas R. Nickel and Ian Frazier Book design by Joel Sternfeld and Gerhard Steidl 132 pages 13.4 x 11.4 in. / 34 x 29 cm 60 photographs Four colour process Clothbound hardcover with a tipped-in photo € 65.00 / £ 50.00 / US$ 88.00 ISBN 978-3-86930-499-1
A Woman Out Shopping with Her Pet Rabbit, Santa Monica, California, August 1988
