The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce an exhibition by the internationally acclaimed American artist Joel Sternfeld to be held in Reading, Vermont from 10 May – 30 November 2025.  This show features approximately twenty of Sternfeld’s now-iconic large-scale color photographs from his celebrated American Prospects and Walking the High Line series, as well as his 2016 video work, London Bridge.

First published in 1987, Sternfeld’s landmark photographic book, American Prospects, pioneered a new voice in the burgeoning field of color photography. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship for his urban street photography in 1978, and compelled to broaden his subject, Sternfeld commenced the American Prospects series. In his Fellowship report, Sternfeld described his urge as being “of someone who grew up with a vision of classical regional America and the order it seemed to contain, to find beauty and harmony in an increasingly uniform, technological, and disturbing America”[1]. Sternfeld purchased a Volkswagen camper and a wooden 8 x 10 view camera, and set off to commence a project that would ultimately conclude in 1984. Crisscrossing the country on periodic trips that lasted anywhere from days, to weeks, to months, Sternfeld chose locations where human development came at a juncture with nature – spots where man had transformed the land for purposes of domesticity, agriculture, industry or pleasure. Sternfeld titled his now-iconic images only after their location and the day on which he captured each scene.  Considered today to be one of Sternfeld’s most famous and widely acclaimed photographic series, American Prospects unfolds the contemporary American landscape with ravishing beauty, deadpan wit and ominous uncertainty. Equally complicated as they are beautiful, Sternfeld presents a portrait of America as relevant and insightful today as when the works were first made.

In his later series, Walking the High Line, Sternfeld continues to investigate the intersection and definition of utopian and dystopian landscapes in America. The High Line was built in 1934 in New York City as an elevated railway to convey foodstuffs from the Hudson Rail Yards into the heart of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Running along the city’s west side from 34^th to Gansevoort Streets, it fell out of commission in the 1980s. In the years following, nature moved onto the abandoned tracks – weeds, grasses and even small trees began to emerge from the track bed. It was this “sliver of heaven” intersecting Manhattan’s iconic cityscape that inspired Sternfeld to photograph the overgrown tracks throughout the changing seasons. Over the course of two years, Sternfeld lugged his bulky 8 x 10 view camera up to the tracks several times a week to record what he described as a “hallucinatory experience of nature in the city”.[2] In a 2002 interview about the project, Sternfeld explained, “My approach has been to look at the landscape to find a kind of beauty as it truly exists.” He cites the untamed nature of the High Line for its wild beauty, declaring it more authentic than even the Yellowstone or Yosemite National Parks.[3]

Sternfeld’s London Bridge (2016) was filmed at Lake Havasu in Arizona. Built in 1831, London Bridge originally spanned the River Thames in London, England before it was sold to Lake Havasu City founder and entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch in 1968. After its sale, the bridge was dismantled, shipped overseas and rebuilt at Lake Havasu, where it is now a tourist destination. Sternfeld’s film features a gondolier dressed in traditional garb, rowing a gondola through the waters around the bridge while serenading onlookers with Italian arias. The gondola and gondolier, archetypal symbols of old world romanticism often featured in 18th century Venetian vedute, are in stark contrast to present-day spring-break life at Lake Havasu—dominated by loud motorboats and raucous groups of bikini-clad youths drinking and dancing to thumping house music. In this globalized mash-up of sensibilities, Sternfeld evokes beauty and terror.

Born in New York in 1944, Joel Sternfeld is a renowned and influential artist using photography, noted for his large-format color photos documenting the American landscape. He earned his B.A. from Dartmouth College and teaches photography at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where he holds the Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History. His works are represented in institutional collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has been the recipient of the Citigroup Photography Prize (2004), the Prix de Rome (1990-91), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1982, 1978), and the National Endowment for the Arts Photographers Fellowship (1980). Approximately twenty books documenting Sternfeld’s projects have been published to date. In 2025, a new edition of American Prospects will be released by Steidl Press. Sternfeld lives and works in New York.

Hall Art Foundation
544 VT Route 106
Reading, VT 05062
United States
 

For more information and images, please contact the Foundation’s administrative office at info@hallartfoundation.org.