Stranger Passing

Over a period of fifteen years Joel Sternfeld travelled across America and took portrait photographs that form in Douglas R. Nickel´s words an "intelligent, unscientific, interpretive sampling of what Americans looked like at the century´s end." Unlike historical portraits which represent significant people in staged surroundings, Sternfeld´s subjects are uncannily "normal": a banker having an evening meal, a teenager collecting shopping carts in a parking lot, a homeless man holding his bedding. Using August Sander´s classic photograph of three peasants on their way to a dance as a starting point, Sternfeld employed a conceptual strategy that amounts to a new theory of the portrait, which might be termed "The Circumstantial Portrait". What happens when we encounter the other in the mist of a circumstance? What presumptions, if any, are valid? What, if anything, can be known of the other from a photographic portrait?