|
September 21, 2008
Joel Sternfeld has traditionally used the large format camera to document a beleaguered land: a polluted landscape invaded by concrete and real estate. His body of work deliberately avoids the picturesque. It doesn't just point the camera at the world. It is an interpretation. The landscape of the 20th century is often the destroyed landscape.
Joel Sternfeld, Looking East on 30th Street on a morning in May 2000, from Walking the Highway series, C-Print
This kind of work is in stark contrast with the digital Flickr aesthetic of dramatic colour and skies that places an emphasis on post-production of photoshop of the individual photo, rather than the picture structure or thinking of developing a form of our time.
Postmodernists, in contrast, often stage scenes for the camera. Postmodernism is the belief that in advanced societies reality is a secondhand experience, a slippery substance filtered through a ghostly scrim of media images. Movie stills, news pictures, advertising -- the world is a deck of pictures; the artist's job is to shuffle and deal, making images that comment upon images. We live in a house of mirrors.
|
Wow, you have very good composition and the modern meets the natural