Joel Sternfeld

As laissez-faire market forces sweep the globe and the earth’s future seems endangered, the dream of living in concert with nature and with one another has acquired an increasing urgency. A common human longing throughout history, the utopian community ideal that has progressively taken root in America. In Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America, Joel Sternfeld looks at representative historic or present American utopias.

Sweet Earth brings together ostensibly disparate, individualized social phenomena and makes visible the community of communities. The early 19th century witnessed the growing hold of the idea of utopia in varied disciplines through the works of Francis Bacon, Jean-Jacques Rosseau and later, David Owen, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Although these social theorists were largely European, utopian communities flourished in the fluid environment of young America, from the “perfect” life that secular and religious communities tried build for their members between 1810 and 1850, to the experimentation of the early 20th century, which reached a fever pitch amid the turbulence of the Vietnam War. Some of the communes from the late-1960s continue to survive and flourish.

The 1990s and early years of the new millennium became yet another hotbed of social experimentation. Currently, the co-housing movement is sweeping America with at least 70 fully-completed and occupied communities, and numerous others planned. This has been accompanied by the rapid global expansion of sustainable communities known as eco-villages, seen across America as well.

Sternfeld’s work represents a melding of time and place that serves to elucidate, honour, and warn. As the survival of history is dependant on photographic representation, Sweet Earth holds a certain urgency. It offers us an archive for the future.