Above Untitled. (©Joel Sternfeld/Courtesy of Steidl).

Produced between 1971 and 1980, Joel Sternfeld’s earliest photographs where published and exhibited in the late seventies and early eighties, and formed a major part of his 1978 Guggenheim Award application. However the success of this grant application and a second that he was awarded in 1982 — which allowed him to work on the nearly decade-long project, American Prospects (Crown, 1987) — has meant that these first photographs have languished largely unseen in the photographers studio, eclipsed by American Prospects which would bring him critical acclaim.

Unlike William Eggleston, who’s aesthetic practice was already formed in black and white, before making the transition to colour photography, Sternfeld who began to revisit these first pictures in 2009 — a process that would reveal that they formed a more substantive body of work than a mere foreground to the work that would follow —  began his serious work as a photographer by working with colour materials, writes Jessica May in her essay Joel Sternfeld’s Early Pictures. ‘The process of teaching himself how to make use of the medium in the late 1960s demanded both a high level of technical knowledge as well as an approach to organising a picture that would take colour as its core concern rather than piling it onto an existing pictorial practice.’

In a recent essay on Stephen Shore, Sternfeld —  who spent the early years of the seventies, establishing a palette as well as to stabilise the look of his work — noted the importance of developing an independent palette, writing, ‘[A] colour photographer must choose a palette as painters would choose theirs.’

Above 9th Street, New York City, 1974. (©Joel Sternfeld/Courtesy of Steidl).

May notes that Sternfeld’s preference for delicate, non-primary hues characterises these earlier photographs. But his ‘choices were not a function of purely formal interests: over the course of the 1970s, Sternfeld came to believe that every historic period has its own characteristic colour scheme and that the 1970s in America would be best represented by such colours, as well as by Day-Glo colours often associated with the 1960s.

Sternfeld’s interest in colour was established in childhood; his parents, both artists, were acutely sensitive to the strong role of colour in artistic sensibility, suggests May, and he developed a nuanced theoretical understanding of colour, in part from a series of publications on colour theory by the artist Josef Albers, whilst citing the Bauhaus Color catalogue by art historian Clark V. Poling as particularly influential in providing an intellectual and historical framework for his use of delicate hues balanced in equal density.

Whilst Sternfeld was familiar with the colour photography of Stephen Shore, who exhibited work from his series American Surfaces at Light Gallery in 1972, and Helen Levitt (1913-2009) whose colour work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York in September, 1974; it would only be after 1974, that he would realise in what ‘good company’ he was, says May, as he began to encounter the work of amongst others, the commercially orientated Ernst Haas (1921-1986), and Eliot Porter (1901-1990) an expert in the dye imbibition (dye transfer) technique and the expressive. Whilst Sternfeld found neither Haas or Porter’s work useful as models, he sought out Levitt who had begun working with colour transparency film on the streets of New York in the late 1950s. ‘Her work offered a model for a poetic street practice in which the resulting photographs combined compositional assurance with the appearance of coincidence,’ writes May, with Levitt eventually becoming a friend and ‘unofficial mentor’ to Sternfeld, with them frequently spending time together making photographs.

Above Washington D.C. August 1974. (©Joel Sternfeld/Courtesy of Steidl).

‘The sense of the photograph as a suggestive window onto a moment (or, in Christian Metz’s memorable phrase, a “cut inside the referent”) characterises many of the photographs in Sternfeld’s early oeuvre,’ suggests May, In First Pictures, ‘the idea that the photograph is a vehicle for a powerful but unresolved narrative is at odds with a competing idea about colour photography as a vehicle for a rounded narrative statement,’ she continues, ‘Sternfeld wrestled back and forth between these positions, but in the fall of 1974, he achieved some resolution after an important visit to Cambridge to meet William Eggleston, who taught briefly at Harvard.’ Sternfeld recalls that he came to recognise Eggleston’s absolute mastery of what Sternfeld termed the ‘poetic snapshot.’ Thus, the question that came to animate his own practice pushed in the opposite direction — how to make photographs, individual and in sequence, that could speak not words or even phrases, but sentences, paragraphs, stories.

Sternfeld moved briefly to Nags Head, North Carolina in the summer of 1975, with the photographs from this period, marked by the qualities of both tenderness and humour that characterise much of his later work. But the sequence also starts to articulate Sternfeld’s concept of photographic narrative, remarks May, as well as its object. It uses photographs both individually and in sequence to describe broad narratives of American life and public culture. 

In First Pictures, we encounter four distinct and separate projects, each of which anticipates Sternfeld’s future work, that begins with American Prospects and extends to the present. Yet, as May points out these early pictures function as far more than mere foregrounding to the artists later career. ‘While the visual complexity of each of these projects prompts a new evaluation of the timing of Sternfeld’s artistic maturity, the thoroughness of Sternfeld’s early approach to colour as a vehicle for the organisation of the picture space and the establishment of a narrative promises to deepen our collective understanding of the history of colour photography.’

First Pictures is published by Steidl. A major retrospective of Sternfeld’s work is at Foam, Amsterdam, until 14 March 2012.