“In Search of America.” New York Times Magazine

In 1978, when Joel Sternfeld received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a new world opened up to the photographer. ''All at once,'' says Sternfeld, who had previously portrayed the streets of his native New York, ''it seemed as if the entire continent, every region, every season and every photographic means were within reach.

In 1978, when Joel Sternfeld received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a new world opened up to the photographer. ''All at once,'' says Sternfeld, who had previously portrayed the streets of his native New York, ''it seemed as if the entire continent, every region, every season and every photographic means were within reach.'' He set out with an old-fashioned Wista large-format camera, a 1972 Volkswagen camper, and the desire to find beauty in the contemporary landscape. Eight years' work is contained in his ''American Prospects,'' to be published by Times Books in April in association with the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, where an exhibition of the work opens on April 5.

Sternfeld captures a regional America giving way to a uniform world of condominiums and freeways. The inhabitants of this new land are materially comfortable but spiritually isolated. The expression of dislocation makes his photographs both powerful and disturbing. Sternfeld will make an unfamiliar scene out of familiar elements. For example, an ordinary woman sits uncomfortably in front of a trailer park which itself sits uncomfortably in a conventionally beautiful Arizona landscape. Each element seems unsure of its relationship to the others. Yet his view of this country is not bleak. Someone, after all, still plays basketball near the edges of the canyons. (Photographs copyright c 1987 by Joel Sternfeld. From ''American Prospects,'' to be published by Times Books, a division of Random House Inc., in April.)

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Copyright New York Times Company Mar 15, 1987