Our Loss

by Joel Sternfeld (Photographer)

In the early morning of 14 April 2018, David Buckel walked into Prospect Park in New York City and set himself alight. He was a distinguished attorney whose work to secure social justice and LGBT rights had won national acclaim. At the time of his death at the age of 60 Buckel had left the practice of law and was working on a community farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn, as the head of composting. He was married to a man with whom he, and a married lesbian couple, were co-raising a college-bound daughter.

In an email sent to the New York Times moments before his death Buckel decried the increasing pollution of the earth. He expressed the hope that his death by fossil fuels would encourage others to be better stewards and cohabitants of the earth. Joel Sternfeld happened to be in Prospect Park on that day with his nine-year-old son. Returning the next day he began to document the gradual regeneration of the site as a means to honor the hope that climate change might be reversed. Our Loss is the latest book by Sternfeld in his ongoing exploration of the effects of climate change, following Oxbow Archive (2008) and When it Changed (2008).

144 pages, Hardcover

First published August 8, 2019

About the author

Joel Sternfeld is an artist-photographer whose work is concerned with utopic and dystopic possibilities of the American experience.

Ever since the publication of his landmark study American Prospects in 1987, his work has maintained conceptual and political aspects, while also being steeped in history, art history, landscape theory and attention to seasonal passage. It is a melancholic, spectacular, funny and profound portrait of America. The curator Kevin Moore has claimed that the work embodies the “synthetic culmination of so many photographic styles of the 1970s, incorporating the humor and social perspicacity of street photography with the detached restraint of New Topographics photographs and the pronounced formalism of works by so many late-decade colorists” (Kevin Moore, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980).

On This Site (1996) examines violence in America while simultaneously raising significant epistemological questions about photographs as objects of knowledge.

Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (2006) “can be seen as a generous respite from the traumatic history in On This Site... It is a survey of American human socialization, alternative ways of living, of hopeful being” (Elin O’Hara Slavik, 2018).

All his subsequent work has sought to expand the narrative possibilities of still photography primarily through an authored text. All of his books and bodies of work converse with each other and may be read as a collective whole.

His work represents a melding of time and place that serves to elucidate, honor, and warn. The images hold a certain urgency, as their histories survive solely through their photographic representation— they are an archive for the future.

Sternfeld is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and spent a year in Italy on a Rome Prize. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, where he holds the Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History.

Reviews

[Paul H. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Our Loss is a prime example of a prevalent tendency in fine art photography since 2000 or so, where ideas/text/narrative serve as a substitute for good photos -- you'd think it would be possible to have both, but this is very rare. Sternfeld is essentially a one-hit wonder (though quite a hit it was), but frankly I expected more of him here.

All of these photos were apparently taken with an iPhone 5s by a college freshman; if Sternfeld's name wasn't on the cover, I guarantee this book would not have been published by Steidl.

[CoopPlayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a moving project, which evokes a lot of thought over a serious subject matter. As a compromise we get a certain lack of aesthetical appeal throughout the project, making no image really stand on their own.