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Stranger Passing
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| Author |
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Joel Sternfeld, photog. Ian Frazier & Douglas R. Nickel, text. |
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| Publisher |
Bulfinch |
| Format |
hardcover, Illustrated
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| ISBN |
0821227521 |
| Pages/Publication Date |
144/2001 |
| Daedalus Item Code |
50198 |
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| This item is not available. |
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| Description |
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Joel Sternfeld first came to international attention in 1987 with the publication of American Prospects, a landmark study of how the modern social order is revealed through landscape, harkening back to Walker Evans' austere summation of the 1930s and Robert Frank's despairing view of the 1950s. Stranger Passing expands that study and functions as a companion volume. In these 60 color portraits of Americans, taken supposedly in the context of their lives, Sternfeld questions the validity of conventional portraiture as documentary practice. Who are these people and what has brought them to this particular landscape at this precise moment? What does their dress signify, if anything, or the things they carry? From a forlorn woman on a New York City street corner, holding a spectacular Christmas wreath, to a man grilling a single hamburger on a broken patio overlooking Cincinnati—and a naked man on a bicycle, responding to a dare, in Washington state—these images juxtapose the formal and the incongruous, the stark and the humane. Sternfeld asks us to decide what we are willing to assume, on the basis of outward appearance, about the person standing next to us in the elevator.
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