Nags Head - Joel Sternfeld tells two personal stories in this book
which together reveal the roots and evolution of color theory
in his work over the past five decades. In the summer of 1975, faced
to surgery with a risk of paralysis, Sternfeld went looking
of a final romance – and found it in Nags Head on the Outer Banks of
North Carolina. From June to August, he photographed the floating coastal city
in time, capturing a dreamlike sense of comfort. The images of
Sternfeld shows bathers of all ages in various leisure scenes and
of leisure in this first body of work dealing with a season. At the time,
Sternfeld was already attached to color as the basis of photographic expression
and fascinated by the Interaction of Color: “Every time I saw a
color phenomenon in the landscape that somehow coincided with a
Albers-type exercise on the perceptual properties of color, I was doing
a photo." \n \nHowever, this summer stay was tragically cut short by the death
Sternfeld's brother; the photographer returned to New York, never to
return to Nags Head. Eventually, Sternfeld returned to work and found a
day at Rockaway Beach in Queens. Here he took a photo in
which "All of a sudden, the ugly scene seemed beautiful to me", the hues of
sand, apartments and sky merged into a coherent whole: finally, the
content had been transcended by color. This photo, taken in the
despair and with its perceptual foundation in the Nags Head series, would lead,
A few years later, to the colorful structures of the magnum opus American
Sternfeld's prospects, to his ambitious realization of what he had always
wanted to do: follow the seasons across America.
