Kreuzberg, Berlin
Joel Sternfeld
American Prospects
Buchmann Galerie"In the autumn of 1978 I set out to travel in America. The Vietnam War was fresh in memory as was the Nixon resignation and the assassinations of the 1960's. I had a desperate need to find that the landscape, and indeed the American experience, yet admitted of Beauty. My journey lasted six years: these are some of the pictures that I made. Here it is, fifty years later, that same need endures although it is more difficult to fulfill." —Joel Sternfeld The Buchmann Galerie is delighted to present an exhibition by Joel Sternfeld, bringing together works from his seminal series American Prospects alongside previously unpublished photographs selected by the artist from this pivotal body of work. Between 1978 and the mid-1990s, Sternfeld traveled systematically across the United States with an 8×10-inch large-format camera. The resulting series, American Prospects, is widely regarded as a landmark in contemporary photography. For this exhibition, Sternfeld returns to and extends this body of work, reflecting on the disquieting atmosphere of America during the Reagan era in light of the present. His restrained, observational approach reveals a nation poised in quiet tension, where ordinary landscapes subtly intimate the possibility of rupture.