Joel Sternfeld entwines two personal stories in this book that together reveal the roots and
evolution of color theory in his work over the past five decades. In the summer of 1975 facing
surgery with a risk of paralysis Sternfeld went in search of a last idyll-and found it in Nags
Head on North Carolina's Outer Banks. From June to August he photographed the seaside town
floating in time capturing a dreamlike sense of solace. Sternfeld's images show beachgoers of
all ages in various scenes of leisure and recreation in this his first body of work addressing
a season. At the time Sternfeld was already committed to color as the basis of photographic
expression and fascinated by Josef Albers' Interaction of Color: Any time that I saw a color
phenomenon in the landscape that somehow coincided with an Albers-type exercise in the
perceptual properties of color I made a photograph. Yet this summer sojourn was tragically
broken by the death of Sternfeld's brother the photographer returned to New York never to go
back to Nags Head. Eventually Sternfeld resumed working and one day headed to Rockaway Beach
Queens. Here he took a picture in which All at once the ugly scene appeared beautiful to me-the
hues of sand apartments and sky fused into a cohesive whole: finally content had been
transcended through color. This photo made in despair and with its perceptual foundation in
the Nags Head series would lead a few years later to the color structures of Sternfeld's
magnum opus American Prospects his ambitious realization of what he had always wanted to do:
follow the seasons across America.
