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Over a period of fifteen years Joel Sternfeld travelled across America and took portrait photographs that form in Douglas§R. 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 man§holding his bedding. Using August Sander s classic photograph of three peasants on their way to a dance as a starting§point, 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 New York City in 1944. He has received numerous§awards including two Guggenheim fellowships, a Prix de Rome and the Citibank Photography Award. Sternfeld s books§published by Steidl include American Prospects (2003), Sweet Earth (2006), Oxbow Archive (2008), First Pictures§(2011) and On This Site (2012).
