“In a good or successful color photograph, the definition or meaning of the image will somehow emerge through the use of color.” — Joel Sternfeld
Joel Sternfeld intertwines two personal stories in this book, which together reveal the roots and evolution of color theory in his work over the past five decades. In the summer of 1975, facing surgery that carried the risk of paralysis, Sternfeld went in search of one last idyll and found it in Nags Head, in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. From June to August, he photographed the seaside town suspended in time, capturing a dreamlike sense of solace. Sternfeld’s images depict bathers of all ages engaged in various scenes of leisure and recreation, in what was his first body of work to address a single season. By then, Sternfeld was already committed to color as the foundation of photographic expression and fascinated by Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color: “Whenever I saw a color phenomenon in the landscape that somehow corresponded to an Albers-like perceptual exercise, color properties, I made a photograph.”
However, this summer sojourn was tragically interrupted by the death of Sternfeld’s brother. The photographer returned to New York and never went back to Nags Head. Eventually, Sternfeld returned to work, and one day made his way to Rockaway Beach, Queens. There he took a photograph in which “Suddenly the ugly scene seemed beautiful to me”: the tones of the sand, the apartments, and the sky merged into a cohesive whole. Finally, the content had transcended itself through color. This photograph, made out of desperation and grounded in the perceptual foundations of the Nags Head series, would lead, several years later, to the color structures of Sternfeld’s masterpiece American Prospects, his ambitious realization of what he had always wanted to do: follow the seasons across America.