Joel Sternfeld – författare

Published to accompany a major touring exhibition, this is the most comprehensive survey to date of the groundbreaking American photographer Helen Levitt. Over six decades, Helen Levitt (1913–2009) explored the streets of her native New York with a handheld camera. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, she found inspiration in the theatre and spontaneity of the street, capturing everyday moments in urban life and forging a distinct visual language from her private observations. Exuding a keen warmth and sensitivity for human gesture and movement, her photographs capture, in James Agee’s words, the ‘pure spontaneity of true folk art’. Accompanying a major touring exhibition of Levitt’s work, the first of its kind to draw from her complete archive, this ambitious publication showcases her entire output. It not only includes her best-known photographs, but also features rarely seen early works from her first year using a Leica and all fifty works from the original edit of her classic 1965 photobook A Way of Seeing, with record prints preserved by Levitt herself. Essays by a range of scholars and specialists hone in on key thematic, technical and biographical aspects of Levitt’s life and work, including an examination of the photos she took during her trip to Mexico in 1941, her innovative use of colour in the 1950s and her late work from the 1980s, providing an authoritative insight into one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century.

As Paris and its shopping arcades were to the 19th Century, Dubai and its wondrous malls may be to the new millennium. The Baudelarian flâneur, is replaced by the phoneur, a wired wanderer who uses the cell phone to text and call and access the internet, all the while snapping digital images on the fly. If the arcades were representative sites of early capitalism, then perhaps the postmodern shopping playgrounds of Dubai are exemplars of advanced capitalism. With this in mind, when Joel Sternfeld visited these malls in 2008, he documented them with the consumer fetish object of the moment – the iPhone. In the process, he achieves a very particular unity of form and content; the object that encapsulates the spirit of an era is used to document that era. The ramifications of a profusion of mobile phone cameras around the globe are numerous. We have already witnessed this phenomenon becoming a platform for news construction with civilian journalism changing the documentation of events. In Dubai, Joel Sternfeld uses his iPhone camera to get past mass media images of the Emirate as Disney World on the Persian Gulf, and find a human component.

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).