A Woman Out Shopping with Her Pet Rabbit, Santa Monica, California, from the series "Stranger Passing"

<p>Starting in 1985 and continuing sporadically over the next 15 years, Joel Sternfeld photographed people he encountered while traveling across the United States, culminating in the portrait series <em>Stranger Passing.</em> With this project, he sought to capture the changing American landscape at the end of the 20th century by presenting a sampling of what the country’s residents looked like at that moment. These seemingly casual, chance encounters were in fact photographed with a camera that uses 8 x 10–inch film, a so-called large-format apparatus that requires considerable time to set up for an exposure. Throughout this coast-to-coast survey, Sternfeld concentrated on the dress, pose, and material possessions of his unnamed subjects—details that invite various assumptions yet, separated from the broader world, resist a definitive typecasting.</p>