Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington, from the series "American Prospects"

Between 1979 and 1983 Joel Sternfeld traveled across the United States, making photographs with a large-format camera mounted on a tripod for a series called American Prospects. His wandering, on-the-road approach to picturing the American landscape coupled a sense of searching with being in the right place at the right time. Here Sternfeld transformed an elephant’s escape from a zoo into an image that reads like a movie still with an elevated vantage point and a wide frame that shows the bystanders and sheriff’s car.