ART REVIEW : Nature Through a Stretch Limo’s Tinted Glass

Joel Sternfeld’s wry color photographs speak quietly of modern man’s uneasy coexistence with nature in “American Prospects: The Photographs of Joel Sternfeld,” at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art through Nov. 27.

Sternfeld offers breathtaking images of the United States: the pastel spring loveliness of the Virginia countryside, the misty magnificence of the Great Smoky Mountains, the quiet nobility of a caribou roaming near a stream in Yellowstone and the austere beauty of a snowy Alaskan landscape.

But, in composing his photographs, the artist has caught the flaw, the quirk, the comedy and sometimes the pathos that man has brought to the scene. Sternfeld seems especially acute at pointing up jarring rural-urban interfaces typical of our times.

The jumble of man-made structures in Gatlinburg, Tenn.--a modern white hotel tower here, a church steeple and the unnatu ral aqua-blue rectangle of a swimming pool there--strike a sharply discordant note when viewed against the gently rolling, wooded Smokies.

Sternfeld seems to intentionally devalue the noble standard of a mighty caribou, loping majestically across a Yellowstone forest clearing, by backing off from the scene, making the caribou only an incidental character, and filling the foreground with the gaggle of casually clad, camera-toting tourists in shorts and T-shirts who have overrun the park.

In truth, Sternfeld doesn’t devalue anything. Rather, he attunes his eye to the elements of progress that can make the truly rare or beautiful seem inconsequential. More often, he uses the incongruous effect to throw some aspect of contemporary life into sharper relief.

The power and beauty of drifting icebergs and snow-tipped mountains near Portage, Alaska, are lost in the unlikely presence of a white stretch limousine with darkened windows in the photo’s foreground.

“American Prospects” was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Its title implies at least two of the meanings of the word prospect : a vantage point for viewing, which the artist always takes, and an outlook for the future, to which the viewer may arrive.

In creating his images, Sternfeld maintains a detached distance from his subjects. He also appears to have added another layer of alienation through the darkroom process. The range of colors of his images seems gently muted.

Sternfeld, who was born in 1944 in New York City, graduated from Dartmouth College and has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Photographers Fellowship. He typically makes his photographs while traveling alone during periods of a week to a year.

He finds his unlikely images just about anywhere, including on a Navajo Indian reservation, where he photographed a team of junior high school boys in football pads, helmets and white jerseys. The tiny players and the barren little patch of schoolyard seem out of sync with both the majestic buttes and chimney formations of the Arizona desert and the boys’ own ancestral traditions. In the whirling white clouds overhead, the tribal spirits appear to be ponderering these braves and their new rite of passage.

Sternfeld uses the environment in creating thoughtful social commentary. He photographs a group of seniors out for a spin on bicycles and tricycles against a boxy, impersonal, modernist housing structure in Palm Beach, Fla. And he links a decaying wooden uranium refinery in the Arizona desert to a distant storm resembling a mushroom cloud.

One of the strongest images in the show is that of a renegade elephant, collapsed on its knees on a county road near Woodland, Wash. We stare, along with Sternfeld, in amazement at this scene--at the sheriff’s patrol car, the little crowd of gawkers and a woman throwing a bucket of water on the exhausted pachyderm.

Suburban housing tracts provide Sternfeld with a favorite subject for portraying a depersonalizing society. At a Gresham, Ore., development, he photographs the belongings of a family, unloaded onto one of the identical driveways serving identical one-story brown houses. With Mt. Hood and a few towering evergreens looking down on this new community, we see, on closer inspection, the mother nursing her baby amid the furniture, dwarfed and all but lost in the pattern of cookie-cutter houses.

Ultimately, Sternfeld seems to be an Everyman, questioning progress everywhere he goes.

One photograph, “The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas,” made in March, 1979, shows a crowd of people come to see the shuttle riding piggyback aboard a 747.

A barrel-chested man in slacks and T-shirt stands just in front of Sternfeld’s lens and observes the throng below. In the man’s build and his casual attire, it’s hard to imagine an image less related to the physical fitness of astronauts or NASA’s high-tech space program. On the other hand, he’s a cinch to relate to on human terms.