Word: sternfeld
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...missions in 72 cities before making a peep. Sure enough, when word got out in January that the company had narrowed its choices to Tampa and Columbus, Salomon was besieged with promoters. Tampa offered Super Bowl tickets; Columbus brandished seats for the Final Four. Says Salomon managing director Marc Sternfeld: "I heard from every personality in Florida and Ohio...
Accordingly, these are mostly pictures shot in the semideveloped region between city and countryside, the kind of not quite urban, not quite rural zone that was seized upon by the French impressionist and postimpressionist painters as the quintessential tilting ground between civilization and the natural state. Sternfeld's vision owes a debt to the unflinching shots of raw suburbs and industrial parks made in the 1970s by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Frank Gohlke, among others. And his penchant for shooting at a far distance has sources in the work of 19th century Western photographers like Timothy H. O'Sullivan...
...Sternfeld's America looks inhabited but never quite settled, full of lovelorn suburban tracts and derelict factories where the banshees howl through the rusting work sheds. When recession comes -- a number of these pictures were taken during the slump of 1981-82 -- the oldest company towns in New England fall like the flimsiest trailer camp in Arizona. When times are good, the wilderness is shown being minced into salable acreage. Above it all, the sky rings its changes, slate blue in one picture, cornflower in the next, baby's-bottom pink in another. It is the last unspoiled stretch...
...this first impression of high-minded melancholy is not the whole mood that Sternfeld means to convey. He develops his feelings more fully in Page, Arizona, August 1983, his admiring picture of a woman presiding on the high ground overlooking the mobile-home encampment where she lives. The metal cartons behind her may not look like much, but her own satisfaction is not to be denied. She has a mythic weight, as well as a bit of the literal kind, and her sly smile makes a strong case in favor of whatever it is that accounts for her contentment. When...
Again and again, however, the eye goes back to a more sober image, Canyon Country, California, June 1983, one of Sternfeld's infrequent portraits. A man sits before the camera with his arm around a young girl who appears to be his daughter. He looks at the lens. She looks into the distance. Behind them, a suburban street heads out toward a ridge of parched mountains. These are the people in the advance guard of that spreading population, the now-and-future pioneers of perhaps doubtful American prospects. If their implacability looks admirable, Sternfeld has also made...