“Joel Sternfeld traveled the country for about eight years with an 8x10 vision camera and color film, a sojourn that produced his first and best-known book, American Prospects… The particular quality that Sternfeld brought to the aesthetics of the 8x10 color landscape… is a distinct narrative sense… In American Prospects, every image suggests that some arcane drama is unfolding: an elephant stranded on a highway in Oregon, or a pumpkin stand in Virginia behind which a house burns fiercely. These narrative suggestions are evocative, astute, often ironic, and frequently mysterious, making American Prospects less a series of photographs than a series of (unfinished, certainly elliptical) tales that add up to a compelling and persuasive vision of America…” (Parr/Badger, The Photobook).