Joel Sternfeld: Nags Head

Color photography lovers, rejoice! Steidl has released a new photobook from American master, Joel Sternfeld. Collecting photographs taken while Sternfeld was contemplating a major health crisis, they capture Nags Head, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, in peak, unself-conscious, Summer-of-1975 form. “Delaying surgery,” Sternfeld writes, “I had come to Nags Head, an old beach town floating in time, seeking a sense of temporal and spatial fluidity, a sense of oneirism. After about six weeks of intense work, my idyll was broken by a phone call: my brother Gabriel had died in an automobile accident in Colorado. I returned to New York; I never went back to Nags Head. Two out of my three brothers were now gone.” He grieved and stopped making photographs.

Eventually, he found his way to Rockaway Beach in Queens. “And then something happened: a different sense came over me, a heightened color awareness engendered perhaps by all the looking and thought I had given to color. At once, the ugly scene appeared beautiful to me.

The hues of the sand and the apartments were the perfect complements to the dusty blue of the sky. Seemingly disparate parts fused into a coherent whole. I made a photograph. Long ago, I had read of a phenomenon which might be described as ‘clear seeing in a clear light.’ Although I cannot now identify the source of this notion, I believe this was such a moment for me. At the time, I had no way of knowing it, but that photograph, made in despair, would eventually shape my entire practice.”