Background information
"In 1836, the landscape painter and conservationist Thomas Cole completed his masterpiece 'View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow),' his iconic painting of the Connecticut River where it bends like an ox yoke. Nearly 200 years later, Joel STERNFELD walked into the field depicted in the lower right quadrant of Cole's painting - which he had first photographed in 1978 while traveling for his seminal 'American Prospects' series - and began making almost daily photographs. By 2006, the oxbow in the river was crossed by an interstate highway and the destructive effects of progress which Cole had so feared were making themselves apparent globally as climate change.
Content
This photo volume, 'Oxbow Archive' by Joel STERNFELD collects 77 of the quietly haunting photographs that Joel STERNFELD made over the next year-and-a-half. His choice of subject matter - a flat, unremarkable corn and potato field - signals a conceptual stance away from previous nature depictions: His field is neither beautiful, nor sublime, nor picturesque. Its flatness offers an eloquent emptiness, as well as a vessel for the true subject of this work - the effects of human consumption upon the natural world. Following Joel STERNFELD'S 'Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America' and 'When It Changed', this volume resounds with political and cultural implications." (publisher's note, © Steidl Verlag)
About the American photographer, Joel STERNFELD (b. 1944)
Photo books by Joel STERNFELD
- Format
- Actual print run, linen bound HC (no dust jacket, as issued), 28 x 31 cm., 144 pp., text language: English