Image: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is scheduled to present ‘American Prospects and Landscape Photography, 1839 to Today’ from October 3, 2026, through April 11, 2027, in an exhibition organized by the museum. The exhibition marks the first time Joel Sternfeld’s photographs, given to the museum as a gift of Peggy and Bill Lyons, will be on view at the Nelson-Atkins.
The exhibition presents 80 works examining changing relationships with the natural world and the history of landscape photography from the medium’s invention to the present, with color photographs from Sternfeld’s influential series ‘American Prospects’ serving as its focal point. Produced between 1978 and 1983 and published as a book in 1987, the photographs set a new standard for color photography.
Using an 8-by-10-inch camera, Sternfeld pictured the American landscape with humor, compassion and an eye for serendipitous encounters, balancing natural splendor, seasonal change and wide-open spaces with evidence of environmental destruction, industrial decline and suburban encroachment.
The survey places Sternfeld alongside photographers including Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Robert Adams, Emmet Gowin, David Maisel, Mitch Epstein, Lauren Greenfield, Victoria Sambunaris, Barbara Bosworth and David Taylor. Works identified in the exhibition materials include Sternfeld’s ‘McLean, Virginia, December 4, 1978,’ Dorothea Lange’s ‘Tractored out, Childress County, Texas, June 1938’ and Lauren Greenfield’s ‘The property line between an abandoned home and its occupied neighbor in the Rosetta Canyon development.’
