June 2006 • Features
From Here to Utopia
Joel Sternfeld’s engaging look at experimental communities taps into the American quest for the perfect alternative.
By Martin C. Pedersen
The images in photographer Joel Sternfeld’s richly textured, smartly sequenced new book, Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (Steidl), run the gamut from the rural splendor—or squalor—of a typical commune to the glorious ruins of Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti. The experience of seeing all 60 together feels both sad and oddly defiant. Their rueful quality is due in part to America’s mixed record with these experiments. But contrary to popular belief, the phenomenon is not a relic of the 1960s. It dates back to at least the 1810s. Sternfeld estimates that 100,000 Americans were participating in utopian experiments by the 1840s. In a way the country itself began as a series of them.
Sternfeld began Sweet Earth while working on a book about violence in America titled On This Site. “At first I thought I would balance those dystopic pictures with photographs of truly utopian places,” Sternfeld writes in the book’s afterword. “But while balance may work in dividing a chocolate bar between two children, it doesn’t necessarily do so in art. I decided to keep On This Site a book about violence. Nevertheless I continued to make pictures of ideal communities.”
Sweet Earth is suffused with empathy, but the gaze isn’t naïve. Some of these experiments have indeed failed, but Sternfeld believes the ideas behind them remain fully contemporary and almost fundamentally American. “I think these people are doing something brave and wonderful,” the photographer says. “I met nothing but terrific people in my travels.” The following are adapted excerpts (both images and text) from the book.
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Los Angeles, California
August 1994
This community of experimental fiberglass domes offers transitional housing for as many as 34 homeless people. Eight of the domes contain common facilities, including kitchens, bathrooms, laundries, and computer rooms. The other 12 provide shelter for single individuals or families. Activist Ted Hayes founded the village in 1993 as an alternative for the many homeless people who are afraid of shelters. The domes allow greater privacy for those who stay in them; the village itself acts as a microcosm of society, providing residents with a setting in which they may stabilize their lives and garner the skills necessary to reenter the “real world.”
With their distinctive design, the domes were meant to call the attention of passing motorists on the nearby Harbor Freeway to the problem of homelessness. Initial funding for Dome Village was provided by the Atlantic Richfield Company. Hayes has a long history of promoting innovative ways to help the homeless that incorporate problem-solving and individual responsibility. He is sometimes referred to as the “Rasta Republican.” In the 1990s he started a cricket team largely made up of black and Latino teenagers and homeless youths, called Homies and the POPz. The team has played at Windsor Castle and is the subject of a 40-minute operetta commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera.
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