Stranger Passing

Over a period of fifteen years Joel Sternfeld travelled across America and took portrait photographs that form in DouglasR. 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 manholding his bedding. Using August Sander's classic photograph of three peasants on their way to a dance as a startingpoint, 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 NewYork City in 1944. He has received numerousawards including two Guggenheim fellowships, a Prix de Rome and the Citibank Photography Award. Sternfeld's bookspublished by Steidl include American Prospects (2003), Sweet Earth (2006), Oxbow Archive (2008), First Pictures(2011) and On This Site (2012).