After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California, July 1979, from the series "American Prospects"

<p>Just as color photography was coming into its own as a medium for art, Joel Sternfeld started his career dedicated to using color film. In the late 1960s he made a major aesthetic shift by transitioning from images of life on the streets captured with a handheld camera to studies of the American landscape taken with a large-format view camera. In 1978 a Guggenheim grant allowed Sternfeld to embark on a nearly decade-long project that began as a drive across the United States. His photographic <em>Wanderjahr</em>, which echoed those of Walker Evans in the 1930s and Robert Frank in the 1950s, yielded the 1987 publication <em>American Prospects</em>, the contents of which the Art Institute owns in its entirety. <em>After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California, July 1979</em> is typical of photographs in that book, many replete with details that take time to register fully, such as the comparison between a more visible car that sits calmly parked and another, destroyed, that lies overturned and embedded in the underside of a largely beige-to-brown landscape. Sternfeld uses color here and often to add layers of emotional complexity to seemingly straightforward images.</p>