Joel Sternfeld: Oxbow Archive
Monday, September 8, 2008
The East Meadows, Northampton, Massachusetts, March 13, 2006 [from "Oxbow Archive"]
© Joel Sternfeld
I’ve always been a big fan of Joel Sternfeld’s work, so I was happy to hear about his exhibition of new photographs that just opened at Luhring Augustine entitled Oxbow Archive. For the large-scale images, Sternfeld focused his 5×7 camera on the varying weather and atmospheric effects in a field in central Massachusetts over the course of a few years, as the seasons changed. From the press release:
Sternfeld’s new work represents a break with painterly notions of the Picturesque and the Sublime; his field is flat, average and indistinguishable from thousands like it. He does not take the view from nearby Mount Holyoke as the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole did in 1833 and look down on the Oxbow of the Connecticut River, the “grandest prospect in North America.” A single field that appears in Cole’s now iconic painting is of ample interest for Sternfeld’s attentive eye.
This work represents a departure from archetypal photographic depictions of nature; grandiloquent mountain views and dramatized skies are eschewed, as are ideal specimens of flora. Anthropomorphization of “perfect form in nature” does not occur; the geometric is not valorized. The photographs are not meant to be metaphoric equivalents of anything else. Rather, the images present themselves without pretense as a systematic index of seasonal progression.
If you’re in New York, stop by the gallery to see the photographs in the flesh – if for nothing else, just to experience the beautifully subtle color palette. If you do in fact like the work, you can look forward to the book, which should be available very soon from Steidl.
Until then, see more from Oxbow Archive online here.
