American Prospects

The creation of Joel Sternfeld's seminal American Prospects is firmly embedded in the history of the photobook. In late August 1978, Sternfeld left New York City and headed out into the American landscape. At the time he thought he would follow the seasons for a year, but with the help of two Guggenheim Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, his journey lasted six years. Sternfeld recalled at the time that the pictures he made were the efforts of "someone who grew up with a vision of classical regional America and the order it seemed to contain, to find beauty and harmony in an increasingly uniform, technological and disturbing America." Working at the pace of two 8 x 10 negatives a day, and not seeing results for several months, he story-boarded at night in his Volkswagen camper. This new edition of American Prospects—at 42 x 35 cm—is larger than all past editions, and conceived to make small details in the frame easier to see. Sternfeld thus facilitates a deeper understanding of the complex prospects he aimed to photograph—prospects in the sense of high-up, pulled back views, but more importantly: the prospects of America moving forward. The pandemic years gave Sternfeld a chance to re-visit all the negatives in his studio, and this edition contains some of these as yet unpublished discoveries. "Little did I know that many of the aspects of the so-called Reagan Revolution, the union busting, the erosion of the quality of life of the middle class and the even less privileged, a turning to the right altogether, would continue unbroken to the present," says Sternfeld. "This edition may reflect this understanding."