Medphoto Festival 2019
Narrative and the Photograph
Workshop with Joel Sternfeld

Contemporary Art Museum of Crete
Duration: 3 - 6 September 2019


Medphoto Festival within its 2019 events organised in cooparation with the Contemporary Art Museum of Crete a workshop by with Joel Sternfeld entitled: Narrative and the Photograph.

The workshop was realized at the Workroom of Fine Arts spaces of CCA.

A tenet of Photography’s turn to post-modernist practice in the 1980’s was the belief that “everything had already been photographed”. If this were somewhat true then, it most certainly is true now in a time when at least 300 million photographs are uploaded to Facebook everyday (and thanks to automatic focusing and exposure they are all pretty good.) 

Ever since the popularization of the cellular phone, documentary or journalistic practice has been supplanted by citizen journalists armed with increasingly powerful iPhones who just happen to have been at the right spot at the right time. 

What role is there now or in the future for the artist photographer who wishes to communicate an urgently held idea or poetic sense? The answer may lie in a practice that might be termed “Narrative Photography”. 

Whether working in fiction or non-fiction, or in a fictive space, artists as diverse as Allan Sekula, Robert Frank, Susan Meiselas, Taryn Simon, or Jim Goldberg, have employed strategies involving text and image, or conceptual strategies for the use of multiple images that have exponentially expanded what might be said with Photography. 

In this seminar the work of these artists, as well as that of Joel Sternfeld (On This Site, Sweet Earth)  served as guide posts for participants as they expand the narrative possibilities of their own work. 

Joel Sternfeld 
Ever since the display of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984 in Three Americans (the other two Robert Adams and Jim Goldberg) Joel Sternfeld’s artistic production has been internationally noted for its narrative tendencies and its willingness to expand the range of ideas that might be photographically stated. 

Writing of American Prospects in the New York Times (“Serendipity All Over Again- Joel Sternfeld Versus his Successors,” January 18, 2004) Richard Woodward claimed “It is hard to look at “American Prospects” and not be reminded of work by Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall both of whom go to elaborate lengths to fabricate images. Their tableaus, which quote from history, painting, and cinema, advertising and photography use actors and studio lighting in hopes of creating the same narrative tension and mystery that Mr. Sternfeld has captured by being in the right place at the right time.” 

A noted educator, he holds the Nobel Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College.