Stranger Passing

Volume edito in occasione della mostra di San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, 6 luglio - 2 ottobre 2001. Saggi di Douglas R. Nickel e Ian Frazier. 60 fotografie a colori di Joel Sternfeld. Testo in inglese

Joel Sternfeld first came to international attention in 1987 with the publication of "American Prospects", a landmark study of how the social order is revealed through landscape. While harkening back to Walker Evans's austere summation of the 1930s and Robert Frank's despairing view of the 1950s, the pictures in "American Prospects" set forth a complex field theory. They spoke, in the words of critic Andy Grundberg, of a time when "the land lost its last pretense of innocence" but also "of men and women seeking to accommodate their primal needs to the imperatives of technological society".
"Stranger Passing" expands that study and functions as a companion to "American Prospects". In it, the inhabitants come to the foreground as America "sits for its portrait," in the words of Douglas Nickel, curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.