Steidl present Nags Headthe candid images of Joel Sternfeld of a summer in the Outer Banks (a string of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina), which later inspired his seminal work American Prospects.
Joel Sternfeld interweaves two personal stories in this book that together reveal the roots and evolution of color theory in his work over the past five decades.
In the summer of 1975, faced with surgery carrying the risk of paralysis, Sternfeld went in search of one last romance and found it in Nags Head, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. From June to August, he photographed the seaside town floating in time, capturing a sense of dreamlike solace. Sternfeld’s images show bathers of all ages in various scenes of leisure and recreation in this first work to address a season. At the time, Sternfeld was already very attached to color as a basis for photographic expression and fascinated by the interplay of Josef Albers’ colors: “Every time I saw a color phenomenon in the landscape which coincided in a certain way or another with an exercise in Albers-type perception of the properties of color, I made a photograph.
However, this summer stay was tragically interrupted by the death of Sternfeld’s brother; the photographer returns to New York never to return to Nags Head. Eventually, Sternfeld returned to work and headed to Rockaway Beach, Queens, one day. Here he took a photo in which “suddenly the ugly scene seemed beautiful to me”: the hues of sand, flats and sky merged into a coherent whole: finally, the content had been transcended by color . This photo, made in desperation and based on perception in the Nags Head series, would lead, a few years later, to the color structures of Sternfeld’s magnum opus, American Prospects, his ambitious realization of what he had always wanted to do : follow the seasons across America.
Joel Sternfeld was born in New York in 1944. He has received numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Prix de Rome and the Citibank Photography Award. Sternfeld is the Nobel Foundation Chair in the History of Art and Culture at Sarah Lawrence College. His books published by Steidl include Sweet Earth (2006), Oxbow Archive (2008), First Pictures (2012), Landscape as Longing (2016) with Frank Gohlke, Rome after Rome (2019) and Our Loss (2019) and a new edition . of his seminal work American Prospects (2023).
Joel Sternfeld: Nags Head
Steidl
Design: Joel Sternfeld, Holger Feroudj / Steidl Design96
96 pages, 71 images
12 x 10 in. / 30.5 x 25.3 cm
Color
Hardcover
ISBN 978-3-96999-318-7
US$55.00 / €50.00
https://steidl.de/Books/Nags-Head-1938525460.html?SID=6gyNzMyf1220
