Joel Sternfeld Quotations

No one can say how long the process of human extinction might take, but as it proceeds, the same global order will prevail that always prevails: rich nations will find ways to protect themselves and make themselves comfortable, while the poor nations and the poor people of the planet will suffer.

I grew up in Belle Harbor, which is in New York City, but it has the most powerful sense of nature and seasons. It wasn't even the beach and the water. I just dreamt about everything that had to do with nature. I read about Thoreau.

With a photograph, you are left with the same modes of interpretation as you are with a book. You ask: 'What do we know about the author and their background? What do I know about the subject?'

Black and white is abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.

A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.

You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. No individual photo explains anything. That's what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.

All of my work has been about ideas of utopia and dystopia. I think that's what gives America interest. It's many things all at once. It's such a complicated society.

I loved the High Line when it was just mine, when I was the only person up there, and I had a private park in New York City. I had to make an appointment to see it... I'd walk around. I was all alone.

I could get my camera and point it at two people and not point it at the homeless third person to the right of the frame, or not include the murder that's going on to the left of the frame.

Photography has always been capable of manipulation.

When you have unity, I think it squares the reach or power of the work.

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

The digital print is becoming the look of our time, and it makes the C-print start to look like a tintype.

For me it was sort of career suicide to work in color, but I did it because I perceived myself from an early stage to be interested in seasonality - the changing of the seasons - thats what I deeply loved.

Some people consider utopia to be derived from nature. For some people, utopia is the city.

Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.

Photography has always been capable of manipulation. Even more subtle and more invidious is the fact that any time you put a frame to the world, it's an interpretation. I could get my camera and point it at two people and not point it at the homeless third person to the right of the frame, or not include the murder that's going on to the left of the frame. You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo. There's an infinite number of ways you can do this: photographs have always been authored.

I'm trying to take pictures of less and less.

Some of the people who are now manipulating photos, such as Andreas Gursky, make the argument - rightly - that the straight photographs of the 1940s and 50s were no such thing. Ansel Adams would slap a red filter on his lens, then spend three days burning and dodging in the dark room, making his prints. That's a manipulation. Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.

No individual photo explains anything. That's what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer's job to get this medium to say what you need it to say. Because photography has a certain verisimilitude, it has gained a currency as truthful - but photographs have always been convincing lies.