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In this landmark volume, now available for the first time in paperback, Joel Sternfeld carries forward into the 1980s the passionate pursuit of Walker Evans in the 1930s and Robert Frank in the 1950s: a unique vision of culture, place, and character - an essence of America. First published in 1987 to great critical acclaim, Joel Sternfeld's startling visual chronicle is at once funny and despairing, ravishing and grim. His luxuriant landscapes are full of sly surprise and deadpan wit: a renegade elephant lies exhausted on a road; beached whales daintily punctuate a majestic seascape; a fireman buys pumpkins while a house burns down behind him. The acid irony and high-minded melancholy of Sternfeld's vision were etched from eight years of criss-crossing the country in a Volkswagen camper. Focusing on the odd yet increasingly common spots where city meets country, where technology meets nature, and where nature often wins the day, Sternfeld brings a tender and ambiguous tone to these views, a tone shaped by the complicated, sweeping nature of the challenge. Dams, hoops, maids, pools, punks, floods, fires, freighters, glaciers, trailers, tracks, moose, Space Shuttles - the American landscape, stuffed full of the mysterious and the absurd, the bleak and the banal and the beautiful, is the all-encompassing subject of this volume. In it Sternfeld finds, again and again, the extraordinary in the ordinary. Whether seen as profoundly sad or strangely hopeful, these pictures of rapture and of regret have the poignancy and resonance of an America uneasy about its past and uncertain of its future.

American Prospects: Photographs: Search Results