![]() ![]() Later the work becomes less provocative but simultaneously more intriguing. His early portraits of National Party stalwarts are frequently chilling, not least because everyone in them, even the children, seem to share a look of suspicion - of the camera and of the world in general. The most overtly political work here belongs to David Goldblatt, the veteran South African photographer, who, over four decades, has documented his country's move from an apartheid state to a troubled democracy. There is an odd serenity about Sternfeld's work that comes from his signature use of warm, muted colours which bathe even the most arresting scene in a sunset glow. Above it, the buildings and palm trees of a motel called Rancho Mirage stand pristine and untouched. Here is a car embedded in mud at the bottom of a ravine caused by a flash flood. Here, for instance, is a farmhouse on fire, an extraordinary dramatic image in itself but made bizarre by the sight of a fireman calmly buying a pumpkin from a stall in the foreground. They are often full of people and movement and capture vignettes that are so dramatic and surreal you wonder how, over and over, he seems to have been in exactly the right place at the right time. In the summer wild flowers and tall yellow grasses bloom among the office blocks and warehouse spaces in the winter a tiny Christmas tree bedecked with lights illuminates a long thread of snow-covered ground - the only sign of human life in an urban landscape being reclaimed by nature.Įlsewhere Sternfeld's big landscapes are the antithesis of Adams's intimate monochrome moments. ![]() His most recent project is entitled Walk the High Line and features images of a disused raised railway track that runs right through the centre of Manhattan. In Joel Sternfeld's work that same natural world often seems to be getting its own back. This is photography as subtle social documentary, recording, in Adams's own words 'a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world we professed to love'. ![]() In one rare human portrait a little girl sits alone and lost in thought as if hemmed in by cars outside another faceless building. The silhouettes of distant mountains rise just above the low rise rooftops of spreading settlements, empty of people but filled with signs of their presence: cars, supermarkets, manicured lawns, neon signs. Vast skies frame squat shopping malls, bungalows, trailer parks. ![]() His series of small black- and-white prints are wilfully understated in their delineation of an American West no longer mythic or elemental but almost entirely suburbanised. Of the four photographers short listed for this year's Citigroup Prize, his is easily the most formal and the most restrained vision. Adams returned to his native Denver in the Seventies and, shocked by what he saw, recorded a landscape tamed and threatened by the homogenising thrust of unrestrained commerce. A further two decades on, Robert Adams's America would be unrecognisable to Kerouac - neither crazy nor beleaguered but almost emptied of mystery by its relentless sameness. ![]()
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