  | Book Details Title: Joel Sternfeld: Oxbow Archive |
Book DescriptionIn 1836, the landscape painter and conservationist Thomas Cole completed "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. This volume collects 77 of the quietly haunting photographs that 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 Sternfeld’s Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America and When It Changed, this volume resounds with political and cultural implications. Customers Review: Joel Sternfeld’s monograph book Oxbow Archive embodies exactly what I want to see in photography. It was like Joel Sternfeld rummaged through my photographic thoughts and came up with the perfect collection of photographs. Sternfeld has created these simple, tranquil, cloudy, cold landscapes of the east coast. There are forests, meadows, cornfields, river banks, snowscapes, wildflowers, and so on. Every photograph has this isolation to it… All the images appear secluded and are so much about the simplicity and beauty of nature and change. The colors are all soft; lots of dark greens, muted yellows, light browns and murky blues, they make you feel like you have to whisper. I love landscape photography, and I love tranquil nature — not like Ansel Adams work, but more so the quiet everyday nature, and Sternfeld tackles this vision beautifully. They are epic in their understatedness. The wildflowers blended with massive clouds — something that could be viewed as “everyday,” becomes transcendent when looked through his lense. These photographs demonstrate something nostalgic, as if the landscape has never changed. While mountain ranges have stayed untouched, so have these small river banks that are no longer recognized. His relationship to nature, American landscape and seasonal change are inspiring. | |
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