Joel Sternfeld’s landmark portrait of American pathos & dreams

A new edition of the iconic photobook American Prospects captures the decline of an empire.

After winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978, photographer Joel Sternfeld embarked on a road trip aboard a Volkswagen camper van. Equipped with an 8 x 10 large-format camera, he left behind his native Brooklyn and his street photography style to pursue something even greater as he followed the rhythm of the seasons across America.

Sternfeld recalls that there was an apocalyptic feeling in the air; the nation was still dealing with the aftermath of the Vietnam War failure and the complete disgrace of Nixon’s presidency. In a desperate search for an illusion of normalcy, voters ignored the warnings of then-President Jimmy Carter about the malaise seeping into the nation's soul, and elected a second-rate Hollywood actor with a finger on the trigger as president in 1980.

“All my work has revolved around ideas of utopia and dystopia. I think that’s what makes America interesting. Many things and all at once.”

Over a decade, Sternfeld returned to the road repeatedly, aided by additional grants from the NEA and Guggenheim. Working with a large-format camera demanded a new approach; at seven dollars per film sheet, he immersed himself in the landscape, mentally visualizing images that distilled the emotional complexity of a nation moving toward the dystopian spectrum of its own decay.

Great Salt Lake, Utah, July 1979

Earl Garvey Realtor, Mojave Desert, California, July 1979

From the beginning of his career, Sternfeld worked in color and was fascinated by how it could elevate the medium to yet unrevealed levels. Color was a force charged with emotions and myths that had the power to reveal deep psychological truths of time and place. For Sternfeld, the large-format camera proved to be the perfect instrument; its monumental format required him to develop rhythms naturally aligned with the landscape.

“I can walk around all day without taking a single photo, and it's still active and exciting. I’m always seeing things, thinking things, creating memories.”

In 1987, Sternfeld published his work as American Prospects, receiving great acclaim for his majestic portrayal of Manifest Destiny run amok. Iconic scenes include the exterior of the infamous Attica prison in New York, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and an abandoned uranium refinery that had been imposed on Navajo Nation lands. One of the most famous images in the series shows a two-story house engulfed in flames, located just behind a farmers’ market and a pumpkin patch in McLean, Virginia. What initially seems like a chaotic tragedy turns out to be, as viewers would later discover, a training exercise. This revelation adds a layer of complexity to an already symbolically loaded scene.

McLean, Virginia, December 1978

Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C., May 1986

Inspired by Walt Whitman, who revised Leaves of Grass throughout his life, Sternfeld revisited American Prospects (Steidl) in 2020 to once more reflect on his portrait of the nation. The revisited edition makes visible inherently intertwined stories in the American landscape that have otherwise gone unnoticed: those of indigenous nations who have been stewards of the land for millennia and now live within the belly of the beast.

Together, these photographs speak of two Americas —myth and truth— that have always coexisted in plain sight. “In the future, without a doubt, these images will be filled with nostalgia, just as we now view Walker Evans's photographs from the 1930s,” writes photography critic Andy Grundberg in the book. “But for now, they speak of a time when progress lost its sense of inevitability.”

“In the future, without a doubt, these images will be filled with nostalgia, just as we now view Walker Evans's photographs from the 1930s,” writes photography critic Andy Grundberg in the book. “But for now, they speak of a time when progress lost its sense of inevitability.”

Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia, April 1983

Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona, August 1983