BERLIN.- The Buchmann Galerie announces the exhibition Campagna Romana by the American photographer Joel Sternfeld (b. 1944). The focus will be the eponymous group of works, which Joel Sternfeld has been working on in the Roman periphery since the early 1990s; it is being shown in Germany for the first time.

The works in Campagna Romana frequently allude to the ruins of ancient Roman aqueducts, villas, and tombs. In some cases, the subjects are the same ones that fascinated Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin in the seventeenth century, Piranesi a hundred years later, and Thomas Cole in the nineteenth century.

Joel Sternfeld juxtaposes the relics of a powerful civilization of the past with the buildings and debris of our day. He also shows how the ruins of monumental Roman buildings have been assimilated as components of a cultural landscape that has evolved over hundreds of years. Whereas the paintings and engravings of the old masters depicted mythical views of the Campagna, Sternfeld is preoccupied with the actual life between these witnesses to a past era. Avoiding obvious contrasts and heavy-handed irony, Joel Sternfeld reveals to us the contradictions of an overdeveloped landscape and its enduring beauty.

The Joel Sternfeld exhibition in the Buchmann Galerie will be supplemented by an exhibition in the Buchmann Box featuring etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) from his Vedute di Roma.

The Foam Amsterdam is currently showing a survey of the artist’s work that was presented previously at the Museum Folkwang in Essen and will travel to the Albertina in Vienna and C/O Berlin.

Joel Sternfeld’s works have been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern in London; the S.M.A.K. in Ghent; and the Fotomuseum Winterthur. Several books have been published by Steidl.