Joel Sternfeld’s famous series American Prospects is currently presented in his solo exhibition at Albertina Museum, Vienna, which follows the artist’s major donation to the Museum, and the present exhibition presents a first-ever survey of these donated works.
Joel Sternfeld numbers among the most important protagonists of the New Color Photography movement, which discovered color for art photography in the 1970s.
Sternfeld has spent years traveling around the United States as a critical observer, documenting the country and its inhabitants in all their idiosyncrasies and contradictions.
His grandiose series American Prospects (1978–86) focuses on how human beings relate to the American landscape—a landscape they’ve helped to shape. In addition to exposing a natural world subject to economic exploitation and threatened by accumulating ecological damage, the frequently whimsical everyday scenes captured by Sternfeld in this series also permit inferences as to the sociopolitical conditions of that era.
