Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects

Joel Sternfeld is an artist-photographer whose work is concerned with utopic and dystopic possibilities of the American experience. Since the publication of his landmark study, American Prospects in 1987 his work has maintained conceptual and political aspects, while being steeped in history, art history, landscape theory and attention to seasonal passage. It is a melancholic, funny and profound portrait of America. All his subsequent work expands the narrative possibilities of still photography primarily through an authored text. All of his books and works converse with each other and may be read as a collective whole. Sternfeld is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and spent a year in Italy on a Rome Prize. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

A specialist in the history of photography, Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of History of Art at University of Oxford. He began his career as a curator, but he also edited art magazines, hosted a radio show, and published a variety of books, most recently Inventing Photography: William Henry Fox Talbot in the Bodleian Library. His writing has been published in twenty-three languages to date and his curated exhibitions shown in Brazil, Australia, United States, Netherlands, UK, Iceland, Japan, Germany and New Zealand. He has a particular interest in the early history of photography but often brings this into conversation with the present, and especially with contemporary art practices.