American Prospects

American Prospects helped make color photography a serious documentary language. It pairs a deadpan large-format eye with the ordinary disasters of American land use, and this Steidl edition is its fullest printing to date.

Joel Sternfeld shot the work between the late 1970s and early 1980s. He drove across the United States with an 8x10 view camera, photographing scenes where landscape, industry, and consumer culture collide. The timing is often dry, almost comic: a house half-swallowed by a sinkhole in the Southern California desert, a fire truck's crew shopping for pumpkins while a barn burns behind them, a hot air balloon drifting over a highway. Times Books first published the work with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1987, a decade after William Eggleston's 1976 MoMA show had opened the door to color as a fine-art medium. It helped confirm that color could carry the same critical weight as black-and-white documentary photography. This fifth, definitive Steidl edition came out in 2020, freed from the size constraints of earlier printings. It adds twelve previously unpublished or unexhibited photographs, including portraits that push the book toward the more human, less landscape-bound territory Sternfeld would take up fully in Stranger Passing. Essays by Kerry Brougher, Andy Grundberg, and Anne W. Tucker accompany the 152-page hardcover.

Sternfeld was born in New York in 1944 and taught for decades at Sarah Lawrence College. Alongside Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and Joel Meyerowitz, he is one of the photographers who established color as the dominant language of American documentary photography. His other major books include Stranger Passing, On This Site, and Oxbow Archive.