"Art gives you what life doesn't"

--Joel Sternfeld

Friday night we went to hear Joel Sternfeld give a lecture. He's one of both of our favorite photographers, and when I caught a glimpse of him beforehand, looking like the resplendently coiffed lovechild of Phil Spector and Bert Lahr, I was enthralled. Though I heard him speak once before as an undergraduate and remembered it fondly, I was nevertheless nervous that someone we held in such high esteem might turn out to be an awful speaker or worse, a jerk.




I had nothing to worry about.

"I love him more than ever," Deirdre scribbled to me about 3/4 of the way into the lecture. I concurred. He was fantastically self-deprecating, funny, yet terrifically sincere, covering the 30+ years of his photography by, he said, glossing over the highlights to focus on less well known work, much of which we probably hadn't seen. I thought I knew his work, but was pleasantly surprised to find that, indeed, there were several projects about which I knew nothing, such as Walking the High Line, Hart Island, and Treading on Kings: Protesting the G8 in Genoa, works with decidedly environmental and political content. Though I'd long known and been inspired by On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam (at left, the crime scene of Mount Rushmore), I hadn't really realized the degree to which Sternfeld's work was waging a quiet war against a myriad of injustices, but I was thrilled to see that not only did his politics agree with mine, but he was able to successfully use photography as a fine art to address larger social, environmental, and political issues.

But it was in his discussion of his most recent work, When it Changed (to be published by Steidl in the fall), that his humanity and artistry interwove to create—oh, hell, I hate weaving metaphors. Aren't they ridiculous? Blech. Anyway, Sternfeld attended the 2005 United Nations Climate Change conference in Montreal, and there he made a series of simple portraits of international representatives photographed right at the moment they were receiving some particularly devastating piece of information. I wish I could find some of them on the web to post here, but they are a collective portrait of shock, pain, defeat, hopelessness, weariness, and dread. Powerful stuff.

"Picture an ideal world and photograph that," was the advice the 99-year old activist Scott Nearing gave Sternfeld upon meeting the photographer and being shown his American Prospects book, which Nearing didn't like for being too critical of America. The first question in the Q&A after the lecture was someone who asked if Sternfeld agreed that in order to be a good photographer one had to be a "good guy." Sternfeld answered thoughtfully and passionately about the urgency of our times, particularly with regard to the environment, and the notion that perhaps being a good guy was not the thing to aspire to in the face of such seemingly insurmountable odds. He acknowledged the limitations of his choice of fine art photography as his chosen mode of communication, not least of which was the fact that photography has been one of the worst environmental polluters there is. It was an answer to end upon, I mean, what could you really ask him after that which would be more meaningful, but predictably, the final persistently waving hand had the last word: "What format camera do you use? Have you ever used digital?" Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, his response was far more gracious than mine would have been.