Joel Sternfeld: On This Site

By Joel Sternfeld

Book Overview

"I went to Central Park to find the place behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art where Jennifer Levin had been killed. It was bewildering to find a scene so beautiful ... to see the same sunlight pour down indifferently on the earth. As I showed the photograph of this site to friends, I realized that I was not alone in thinking of her when walking by the Met. It occurred to me that I held something within: a list of places that I cannot forget because of the tragedies that identify them, and I began to wonder if each of us has such a list. I set out to photograph sites that were marked during my lifetime. Yet, there was something else that drew me to this work. I think of it as the question of knowability. Experience has taught me again and again that you can never know what lies beneath a surface or behind a fa?ade. Our sense of place, our understanding of photographs of the landscape is inevitably limited and fraught with misreading." --Joel Sternfeld.

Between 1993 and 1996, Joel Sternfeld photographed 50 infamous crime sites around the US. On This Site contains images of these unsettlingly normal places, ordinary landscapes left behind after tragedies, their hidden stories disturbingly invisible. Each photograph is accompanied by a text describing the crime that took place at the location. This is the first Steidl edition of On This Site, originally published in 1996 to great acclaim.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3869304340
• ISBN13: 9783869304342
• Release Date: July 2012
• Publisher: Steidl
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 2.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 11.8" x 9.9"

Customer Reviews

Amazing

Words are not needed in this great photo essay in life of violence and tragedy in America. Ordinary places, amazing events. The corner where MADD's founded was killed by a drunk driver, Love Canal, Imperial Food Fire, the former Store where Emmett Tills whistled at a white woman and was brutally killed, Polly Klass, Magan Kanka, Yummy Sandifer, Waco, OK Fed Building. All memories that rose anew when I read the book. It sits on my desk at work as reminder that we should never forget these tragic events.

on the problem of emptiness

Joel Sternfeld's work as a conceptual photographer exhibits a degree of understanding of emptiness, of unspoken gaps, of silence. He is taking the pictures of the places where famous tragic events in America were taking place, some years after the fact. The photographs are creating a very strong sense of the "negative event" space, where something which is not told is infinitely more important that what was told. Also I highly recommend Joel Sternfeld 's most recent exhibition catalog "Stranger Passing", where he travels the roads of America, and takes pictures with his large-format camera. Although all his pictures include people in various situations (attending a party, selling coffee, hanging out in their own homes, vacationing, promenading, relaxing, observing, working), what he is really interested in, is the depiction of landscapes and soft outplay of the mid-afternoon light.

Terrificly Somber

This book is both beautiful and moving Sternfeld takes you to the sites of some of humanity's worst moments, and presents them literally in a new light. You might even learn some history.