Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects

Joel Sternfeld’s seminal series American Prospects (1978–86) focuses on how human beings relate to the American landscape—a landscape they’ve helped to shape. In addition to exposing a natural world subject to economic exploitation and threatened by accumulating ecological damage, the frequently whimsical everyday scenes captured by Sternfeld in this series also permit inferences as to the sociopolitical conditions of that era.

American Prospects is part of a major donation to the ALBERTINA Museum by the artist himself, and the current exhibition presents a first-ever survey of these donated works. On view through 21 January 2024.