Joel Sternfeld
Joel Sternfeld
Joel Sternfeldis a fine-art color photographer noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and helping establish color photography as a respected artistic medium. He has many works in the permanent collections of the MOMA in New York City and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He has influenced a generation of color photographers, including Andreas Gursky, who borrows many of Sternfeld's techniques and approaches...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth30 June 1944
CountryUnited States of America
I'm trying to take pictures of less and less.
Some of the people who are now manipulating photos, such as Andreas Gursky, make the argument - rightly - that the straight photographs of the 1940s and 50s were no such thing. Ansel Adams would slap a red filter on his lens, then spend three days burning and dodging in the dark room, making his prints. That's a manipulation. Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.
The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.
No individual photo explains anything. That's what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer's job to get this medium to say what you need it to say. Because photography has a certain verisimilitude, it has gained a currency as truthful - but photographs have always been convincing lies.
All of my work has been about ideas of utopia and dystopia. I think that's what gives America interest. It's many things all at once. It's such a complicated society.
When you have unity, I think it squares the reach or power of the work.
A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.