Globalisation and the Art Photography of Joel Sternfeld

Abstract

The article discusses Joel Sternfeld's project Treading on Kings: Protesting the G8 in Genoa (2001) published on the occasion of an exhibition of Sternfeld's project at the White Box Gallery in New York. The series of twenty-seven formal portraits, which form the basic body of the book, was taken during the anti-globalisation protests in Genoa in 2001 documenting the resistance to the limits of globalisation. The paper examines the project placing it in opposition to other practices, including documentary photography, street photography and photojournalism. It positions the series within other contemporary photographic projects that privilege straightforward pose and strict composition of portraits and highlights the interrelationship between the visual and the textual in the book. It argues that while there are many common elements with these genres, Sternfeld manages to emphasise the project's clear political commitment via a fusion of various aesthetic qualities.

Notes

1 William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, as quoted in Sternfeld n. pag.

2 For more information about the international campaign for justice in Bhopal, see <http://www.bhopal.net/>.

3 The quote is from the introduction written on 1 Aug. 1939 by Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor.

4 Exhibition Press Release at <http://www.whiteboxny.org/home.html> (accessed 10 Nov. 2007).

5 Ibid.