Stranger Passing

Stranger Passing takes the deadpan wide shots of American Prospects and moves in close. It gathers sixty color portraits of people Sternfeld stopped on sidewalks, parking lots, and roadsides across fifteen years of travel.

American Prospects reads the American landscape for its ironies. This book reads its faces instead: a banker eating lunch alone, a teenager gathering shopping carts in a strip-mall lot, a man asleep on his bedding in public. Sternfeld approaches each subject directly, without condescension. He has called it an unscientific, interpretive sampling of what Americans looked like at the end of the twentieth century. Bulfinch Press published the book in 2001, a 144-page oblong hardcover with essays by the writer Ian Frazier and the photography historian Douglas R. Nickel. A softcover edition followed the same year from Melcher Media, in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to accompany an SFMOMA exhibition of the work that summer.

Sternfeld was born in New York in 1944. He is best known for American Prospects (1987), the large-format color survey that established his reputation; Stranger Passing is its direct, portrait-based sequel. He taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College and remains a central figure in the history of American color documentary photography.