ON THIS SITE: LANDSCAPE IN MEMORIAM
Joel Sternfeld
Joel Sternfeld: ON THIS SITE: LANDSCAPE IN MEMORIAM. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996. First edition [issued simultaneously in cloth and paper]. A nearly fine softcover book in printed laminated French folded wrappers: laminante lifting to lower bottom corner and a trace of edgewear. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A nice copy of this easily-bused volume.
10.25 x 12.25 softcover book with 50 full page full-color images.
From the book: "In this sobering collection of photographs, Joel Sternfeld looks at fifty places where violence has stained the American landscape. Arriving long after news photographers have gone, he presents us with the landscape that is left behind, the ordinary site that remains after the tragedy. Free of the sensationalism of contemporary reporting, these unadorned images, and the brief text that accompanies them, have a surprising power, allowing us to contemplate the meaning of what has taken place, and what has been lost."
“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 facade. Our sense of place, our understanding of photographs of the landscape is inevitably limited and fraught with misreading.” — Joel Sternfeld
With his two earlier titles, American Prospects and Campagna Romana, Joel Sternfeld established himself as one of photography's foremost wits. His images have always ironcially shown the intrusion of man into a world of beauty, persuasively rendered in classical proportions and color. On This Site explores the irony that cannot be seen in any photograph: beautiful scenes where horrible events occured. Sternfeld has revisited the sites of 50 infamous crimes and returned with images of unsettlingly normal places; their histories disturbingly invisible.