The first compositional quality one notices in these photographs is the broad perspectives: the wide angles that generally define each scene, that allow meanings to emerge over time instead of all at once. The viewer scans the pictures, looking at one item and then another, trying to figure out which detail is most important and how it might then be used to assert the overall significance of the image. The photographs in this book were taken in the late 1970s and early 1980s as Sternfeld criss-crossed the country over and over. He needed the wide angles to get in what the eye sees, what he saw as a traveler. These perspectives force the viewer to do most of the work, to figure out what there is to see within the frame and how to interpret it all.
The first thematic quality that one notices in American Prospects is a pervasive irony. It's generally a whimsical irony, not a bitter one--light and amused, sarcasm at a glance but not in any kind of depth--and it arises most frequently from the juxtaposition of the natural and the synthetic. In one photo, a wind-beaten basketball post stands forlorn on a barren plain in an Arizona landscape that otherwise bears no evidence of the existence of the human species.
Other photos posit stormy skies lingering over a gleaming new subdivision or a line of tourists on horseback , escaping the hazards of the civilization they have created, trailing through a scrub-laden Arizona landscape. Where does our authority end and nature's begin?
In this context, photographs that do not ostensibly push this theme can be seen as pushing this theme. Sternfeld's picture of Harris Ranch, a California ag-industry giant, displays a cattle pen densely packed with animals. There's not a single jot of green to be seen within the fencing, which makes us question the nature of this domesticated arrangement and its relationship with our now rather quaint notions of the pastoral. Several of the cows are lined up along the barrier, staring into the camera, it seems, or staring out at the space that lies beyond the palings. Then there is the photograph of a bald-topped man, what hair he has dishevelled, barrel-bellied in gray slacks and white t-shirt, seen from behind and off-center in the foreground as he stares across a runway at the space shuttle Columbia, preparing for its maiden voyage.
This image might spur thoughts on the nature of space exploration and the limitations of habitable human landscape, but more immediate to the viewer it creates a contrast between this dumpy looking man and the sleek new machine that he watches from a distance. He's probably the one who built the thing, the viewer might decide. Elsewhere, trains shuffle off beside Eastern hillsides lined with telephone wires and redbuds in flower, and everywhere in the West subdivisions spring up out of the desert floor like mushroom colonies after a sudden intense rain. In Cato, New York, two hogs gaze thoughtfully into the distance while a decrepit outbuilding slowly sinks back into the hillside. Nature is taking it back.
Many of Sternfeld's photographs do just fine without any human subjects; the existence of our species is implied well enough. Others treat people as just another part of the landscape, and others still serve as fine examples of portraiture in a particularly Sternfeldian mode. The most ennobling example of this in American Prospects is "A Blind Man in His Garden, Homer, Alaska, July 1984," which recasts Alaska as Paradise and a blind man (presumably, by his CAT ballcap, a former driver of heavy machinery) as the sole resident. His hollyhocks extend several feet higher than his head, and the whole garden is abloom at once: foxglove, columbine, daisies, all improbably tall and densely clustered.
Perhaps Sternfeld's most complex examination of human character can be found in "Solar Pool Petals, Tuscon, Arizona, April 1979." An older man stands in the foreground on the right side of the frame on a patio stair that leads down to a swimming pool. The pool is covered with the lily-pad-like disks evoked in the title. An untied tie drapes over the man's neck. We don't need anything else to tell us that it's the end of the day--if nothing else, the tie does it, but the light in the sky also suggests it. The man's hair is graying, and his stance and attitude are nearly identical to those of the man watching the space shuttle--standing in the "work done" position--but this man is not willing to go as far as stripping down to his t-shirt. His face is away from us, his hands on his hips. A woman of indeterminate age (somehow younger seeming) lounges on a chair poolside. Her face is also away from us, staring down the distance, assessing the day. They could be father and daughter, or they could be husband and wife. They could also be complete strangers, for all we know. The woman seems to be unaware of the presence of this man--or she is deliberately ignoring him (my wife is definitively for the latter interpretation).
Does he look at her, or does he look over the edge of the brick wall at the cactuses, palms, and telephone wires that stretch out along the hillside, the city faintly visible in the haze below in the valley? Perhaps he is looking out over the low wall only to try to see what it is that she sees. We could never know at this point. There are layers of perspective here: the woman's, the man's, the photographer's, our own. It's only that last one that we can ever be sure about, but then we notice the photographer telling us to look at the man again, and the man telling us to look at the woman, and then the woman telling us to look out at that distant vision of the greater world that is beyond us all. There's a story here, and we come so close to it, but we'll never know what it is unless we imagine it. The photograph stops just short of expressing a meaning that extends beyond a lesson in perspective, but if anything we might find it all the more meaningful for that.
Also along human lines, "Studio City, California, June 1982" portrays a punk-rock Adam and Eve in a mixed-up tableau, banished to the suburbs, an orange tree behind them bearing some kind of forbidden fruit. The couple might be seventeen, but the expressions on their faces could just as well have been at home on the faces of a couple married forty years. Under this Adam's mohawk is a stern but straight-ahead set of eyes, and this Eve with her short bleached hair looks slightly askance, the slightest touch of a smile--or is it a smirk?--touching her lips. This is their Garden. One wonders if they are still there today. Based on the photograph, you might say that it is at least a possibility.
Another photograph, "Member of the Christ Family Religious Sect, Hidalgo County, Texas, January 1983," more overtly grapples with a religious theme. A young bearded hermit in what we take to be rough woolen robes has emerged, from the torso up, from his simple hermitage: a hole in the ground covered with two-by-fours. Here is a seeker, a man encountering God and nature and the elements, finding out what life is about, whether it be mean or profound, trying to figure out how to get to where it is he wants to go when the time for going comes. The setting is Texas, but the hot-weather brush and the hard-packed dry-dirt floor of the ground evoke thoughts of the Holy Land. If there is a perfectly cultivated field, crops lined up in unerringly straight rows, in the distance behind him, we can come to terms with that easily enough: wilderness has its limitations, its end points, and cultivation is certainly a Biblical thing--parable of the mustard seed and all of that. But then we look closer and we see that, in the hermit's right hand, near the fold of his robe, he holds an orange. Oranges do grow in Texas, maybe even on one of the trees surrounding this rough hermitage. But there's something about that orange that clashes with our notions of Biblical asceticism, something that smacks of luxury. Something about it suggests cheating--locusts and honey, but not oranges. The piece of fruit serves as a knowing wink to the viewer. (Does our hermit have some connection to Adam and Eve in Studio City?)
More than any of the others, though, one photograph brings together all of the major elements at work throughout American Prospects. This is also Sternfeld's most famous image. I have done my own part to make it that much more famous by sharing it over the years with my English comp students as an exercise in attention to detail.
There are so many things going on at once in this picture, "McLean, Virginia, December 1978," and the chief irony, duly noted by all who look at the image, is the fireman picking out (stealing?) pumpkins while a house burns down in the background. There are leading lines going every which way here, so many things to look at that I won't bother enumerating them all, but I will tell a story, how I once showed this photo to a colleague who grew up in McLean, how he thought he remembered the place, the event, how he confirmed my theory that the burning house was being used for fire practice, he thought, but then he wasn't sure. Which is to say that this is a story about how memory plays tricks with suggestion, how we see ourselves sometimes as residents of a past time and place that, when we stop to think about it, we're not really sure existed. I experience the same thing when I see images of myself running along the beach in south Texas, three years old. I can't remember if I remember the event or if I just remember seeing the pictures, hearing people tell me about it. The mystery of what happened inevitably remains mysterious despite our best attempts at analysis.
There are so many other photographs here worthy of discussion: a beautiful stream of rusted-out automobiles spilling down a hill covered with sparkling aspens in the fall; a U-Haul parked in front of a new home construction, a family's furniture spilling out the back of the van, and sitting on a sofa in the midst of it all a mother with her breast bared feeding an infant child; the Wet 'n Wild Aquatic Theme Park in Orlando, pumping out shimmering articial blue waves just a few dozen miles from the ocean; a group of three domestic workers waiting for the bus in an immaculate Atlanta suburb.
This book provided my grounding in photography, so that when I first came upon Susan Sontag's claim, in On Photography, that this medium provides the "worst form of mental pollution," I could hardly restrain my ire. Words can do anything: they can deceive or tell the truth, though more often than not what they do best is something in between. American Prospects proves that photography can be as rich as any other form of communication, as full of meaning or deception or some odd admixture of the two.
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