Idiom Magazine's Sam Biederman's thoughtful, personal essay on subject-artist-viewer relationships in the Joel Sternfeld photograph Barefoot Attorney (1989) caused a stir this week. Biederman's father happens to be the subject of the photograph and so the essay offers access to the usually-silent subject. Almost as soon as the piece was posted, Idiom received a strongly-worded email from Sternfeld via his gallery, Luhring Augustine, asking for the illustrating photograph to be removed immediately (from the journal's website, and apparently everywhere else, because it's disappeared from the Art Institute of Chicago's online collection too). It seems that Sternfeld didn't like the mystique of his image transgressed by his subject's autobiographic details.
I wrote a thesis on Sternfeld's Hart Island series and met him in the process (an engaging man). For me, Biederman's essay only serves to highlight the contested nature of subject and subjectivity in photography, without contesting the enduring beauty of Sternfeld's work. It's a shame the artist didn't see it this way too.
