Lovelorn Tracts, Minced Wilderness

By Richard Lacayo

A photographer may release pictures into the world for years. He may even win a bit of fame in the process. But it can take a survey show to make his full intentions clear. The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston last week opened a welcome exhibition that does just that for Joel Sternfeld, whose images of Americans contesting with their landscape began appearing in the late 1970s. The exhibit, which runs in Houston through June 7 and later moves on to Detroit and Baltimore, binds Sternfeld's work into a whole. Pictures that were once compelling oddities are now linked into an original meditation on the national life. It clinches the case for Sternfeld, 42, as an emerging American master.

Sternfeld takes most of his pictures during the time he can get off from teaching photography, which he does these days at Sarah Lawrence College. Earlier in his career he was known for his 35-mm urban street scenes. In 1978 he received the first of two Guggenheim grants for a series of cross-country travels. He used part of the money to buy a tripod-mounted 8-by-10 view camera that produces the fine detail essential to the new images he was after. When his pictures from those trips began appearing in photography magazines and exhibits, the most talked about featured a cool view of the relationship between people and nature: a suburban street in California after a flash flood; a runaway elephant that has collapsed near a sheriff's car in Washington State; a herd of beached sperm whales viewed from so far away that a few seem no bigger than commas, bereft bits of creation in a panoramic beachscape.

Strange pictures: deadpan but not flippant, ironic but not campy. They ( used advanced elements of photographic language -- extreme distance from the subject, unemphatic treatment, carefully achieved but understated color -- but to pose what questions? Not until the Houston show, assembled by Curator Anne W. Tucker, were Sternfeld's purposes really clear. The title American Prospects, which applies to both the show and an accompanying volume of his work (Times Books; $40), points to Sternfeld's ambition for his work to be placed in the line of two other great photo essays on the national mood: Walker Evans' American Photographs (1938) and Robert Frank's The Americans (1958). More than either predecessor, however, Sternfeld's account depends on landscape and on the way Americans have fit themselves into it.

Accordingly, these are mostly pictures shot in the semideveloped region between city and countryside, the kind of not quite urban, not quite rural zone that was seized upon by the French impressionist and postimpressionist painters as the quintessential tilting ground between civilization and the natural state. Sternfeld's vision owes a debt to the unflinching shots of raw suburbs and industrial parks made in the 1970s by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz and Frank Gohlke, among others. And his penchant for shooting at a far distance has sources in the work of 19th century Western photographers like Timothy H. O'Sullivan and Carleton Watkins, pictures full of small figures against large vistas that showed how the American continent could take the measure of people in more ways than one. But his mix of tenderness and apprehension is thoroughly his own.

Sternfeld's America looks inhabited but never quite settled, full of lovelorn suburban tracts and derelict factories where the banshees howl through the rusting work sheds. When recession comes -- a number of these pictures were taken during the slump of 1981-82 -- the oldest company towns in New England fall like the flimsiest trailer camp in Arizona. When times are good, the wilderness is shown being minced into salable acreage. Above it all, the sky rings its changes, slate blue in one picture, cornflower in the next, baby's-bottom pink in another. It is the last unspoiled stretch of America, the only patch of nature where the developers cannot get a foothold.

But this first impression of high-minded melancholy is not the whole mood that Sternfeld means to convey. He develops his feelings more fully in Page, Arizona, August 1983, his admiring picture of a woman presiding on the high ground overlooking the mobile-home encampment where she lives. The metal cartons behind her may not look like much, but her own satisfaction is not to be denied. She has a mythic weight, as well as a bit of the literal kind, and her sly smile makes a strong case in favor of whatever it is that accounts for her contentment. When people spread into the landscape, who is to draw the limits? Sternfeld's picture may not answer the question, but he poses it in terms sympathetic to democratic sprawl. The asphalt road that rises diagonally behind the woman could be a heraldic line for the house of tomorrow.

Again and again, however, the eye goes back to a more sober image, Canyon Country, California, June 1983, one of Sternfeld's infrequent portraits. A man sits before the camera with his arm around a young girl who appears to be his daughter. He looks at the lens. She looks into the distance. Behind them, a suburban street heads out toward a ridge of parched mountains. These are the people in the advance guard of that spreading population, the now-and-future pioneers of perhaps doubtful American prospects. If their implacability looks admirable, Sternfeld has also made us see it as strangely unsettling, the risk of a squandered endowment. In the end, who needs the wilderness? For terra incognita, we have ourselves.