Joel Sternfeld
A native New Yorker, Joel Sternfeld (1944–) has worked for five decades in the medium of color photography and with his preferred subjects of people and landscapes. He is noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and has helped to establish color photography as a respected artistic medium. His important series of works in and around New York City, Hart Island and The High Line, continue his projects of illuminating little-known realms of the metropolis. Sternfeld’s blend of precise naturalism with a sweeping breadth of vision and complexities of light lies closer to the aesthetic of the late-nineteenth-century Symbolist landscape paintings by John Everett Millais.
Sternfeld is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and spent a year in Italy on a Rome Prize. His work is found in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where he holds the Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History.
