Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias

by Joel Sternfeld (Photographer)

It is a dream we have all cherished at least fleetingly: the hope of finding a place in this world in which to live more simply, surrounded by beauty and like-minded people. Photographer Joel Sternfeld's new book Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America explores the past and present of these idealized communities across the United States. Sternfeld's photographs highlight the land on which these foundations for bliss were built while the accompanying text lends insight into the people whose vision led to their creation. And the two have much in common. Like the would-be creators of these Utopias, the photographs are beautiful and appear simple at first glance - only to reveal a rich complexity when studied further. Andy Nelson

Genres: Photography

136 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2006

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

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing, please come over and read it while eating my homemade babganoush and tomato salad, drinking wine under the tree in the backyard where the eggplant and tomates grew, because really, that is home it should be experienced. Also if u plan to visit any of these communes or now defunct communes take me with you. xo

[Selene Colburn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book -- the photographs are evocative (and huge enough to really see them) and the accompanying text grounds the images without intruding on their potency. My only minor quibble was that I wanted more; didn't always feel like a single image was enough. Where are the deleted scenes?

[Carmen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Photography book that captures alternative-lifestyle communities with corresponding testimonials from inhabitants. Focuses particularly on "green" communities.

[Kyla · Rating 4 out of 5]

So completely brief, but each small sentence contains an idea or a place or a person I NEED to know more about immediately. The mouth of the river of some satisfying research. or something.