On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam. [Subtitle]: Armin Harris, Project Editor

by Joel Sternfeld

AUCTION DESCRIPTION

Genres: Photography, Nonfiction, Art, Architecture, Art and Photography

Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Joel Sternfeld is an artist-photographer whose work is concerned with utopic and dystopic possibilities of the American experience.

Ever since the publication of his landmark study American Prospects in 1987, his work has maintained conceptual and political aspects, while also being steeped in history, art history, landscape theory and attention to seasonal passage. It is a melancholic, spectacular, funny and profound portrait of America. The curator Kevin Moore has claimed that the work embodies the “synthetic culmination of so many photographic styles of the 1970s, incorporating the humor and social perspicacity of street photography with the detached restraint of New Topographics photographs and the pronounced formalism of works by so many late-decade colorists” (Kevin Moore, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980).

On This Site (1996) examines violence in America while simultaneously raising significant epistemological questions about photographs as objects of knowledge.

Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (2006) “can be seen as a generous respite from the traumatic history in On This Site... It is a survey of American human socialization, alternative ways of living, of hopeful being” (Elin O’Hara Slavik, 2018).

All his subsequent work has sought to expand the narrative possibilities of still photography primarily through an authored text. All of his books and bodies of work converse with each other and may be read as a collective whole.

His work represents a melding of time and place that serves to elucidate, honor, and warn. The images hold a certain urgency, as their histories survive solely through their photographic representation— they are an archive for the future.

Sternfeld is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and spent a year in Italy on a Rome Prize. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, where he holds the Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History.

Reviews

[Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subtitled Landscape in Memorium, this photography book is a series of pictures of otherwise ordinary places connected to a violent act; the minimal text explains what had occurred, when, and to and by whom. It's an effective conceit which conveys two ideas: one, that what is seen surface level is often obscuring or misleading, and two, the ruthlessness of time passing. On occasion the device doesn't work, in particular the picture of the movie theatre seat where Lee Harvey Oswald was sitting when he was arrested--which looks exactly like a million other movie theatre seats. But more often a real poignancy is felt. A beautiful shot of a quiet suburban street, Fall colors on the trees, is where Cari Lightner was killed by a drunk driver in Fair Oaks, CA. Her mother, Candy Lightner, would form MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). A desolate-looking street in Winter, trees bare and snow on the ground, is where a 12-year-old paperboy, Johnny Gosch, vanished in Des Moines, IA in 1982, after being seen talking to a man in a blue car, never to be found. An ordinary picture of a highway in Oklahoma, flat in all directions with fields or grass and a single telephone pole, becomes haunting when you read it's where Karen Silkwood, a plutonium plant worker, was driving with incriminating documents on her way to meet a New York Times reporter when her car was apparently forced off the road by another car, the accident killing her, the documents then going missing.

Two photographs are particularly pregnant with meaning. In one, the site depicted is where a 7-year-old girl was lured into a neighboring house then raped and murdered. But the house isn't there; it was torn down and replaced with a park dedicated to the girl, Megan Kanka. Another picture shows an ordinary bus shelter in Washington D.C. where a homeless woman, Yetta Adams, after being turned away by a shelter, froze to death overnight sitting upright. Across the street is a large building identified as the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

I did note two mistakes in the book. A picture of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk's office is misidentified as former Supervisor Dan White's office (White of course was the assassin of Milk in 1978). And a picture of the street in New York where Kitty Genovese was fatally stabbed near her apartment in 1964 has text that repeats the debunked urban legend that 38 people heard her cries for help and did nothing. First, the number is exaggerated, more importantly, several people did in fact call the police, and two people tried to assist her. One was a gay man who felt he couldn't call or talk to police because he was gay in 1964, another was a woman who held Kitty (who was also gay, which newspapers of the time made no mention of) as she died. Also, the attack didn't happen on the street but in a courtyard within the apartment complex.

So this is quite different than most coffee table books, and cumulatively very effective.

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this years ago, and found it again and sat down with it. Kind of a weird juxtaposition...

I this book are pictures of places. Places that look like nothing of note happened. Oil and grease stained carport. A bus shelter across from a sterile looking office building.The side the road. Only by reading the copy do you learn someone was killed here. Someone froze to death here. Someone was beaten here.

I read this in the house my parents live, and if I took a picture of my parents' bedroom, you wouldn't see anything remarkable. A king size bed. A few dressers. A lounge chair. An expansive light green carpet. You wouldn't know that's where my dad fell and breathed his last on his way to bed one night.

The story is not in the picture, per se, but it's in the place, and this book isn't pretty, or the pictures even necessarily well-composed or emotive. It's only when learning what happened there is what makes these things special, or noteworthy, or creepy, or poignant.

One thing; take the write ups with a grain of salt. After reading the Emmett Till synopsis ("he wanted to shows cousins he could talk to white women...'hey baby') and, because it is SPECTACULARLY wrong, I can't imagine that every other point in this book is true.

[dv · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lavoro che nelle intenzioni di Sternfeld lavora sulla memoria dei luoghi, mostrando immagini di luoghi associati a storie di violenza. Per l'autore, si tratta di fermare in una foto i pensieri che il passare davanti a uno di questi luoghi evoca. Data la neutralità dei luoghi (e la tecnica altrettanto neutra di ripresa), entra in gioco un altro elemento, cioè il potere del testo/didascalia di fronte alla immagini. A differenza di altri lavori di Sternfeld, qui la foto da sola non "parla" e acquisisce senso solo dopo la lettura delle righe di descrizione.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subject of a recent exhibition at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography (Columbia College), Sternfeld's art is haunting and strangely inspiring. All of the pictures are of politically charged landscapes around the United States, showing the normality of "place" and just how impacting human behavior can be when it intersects with these places. I appreciated what I read as the message of fear and hope intersecting in these pictures.

[Loren · Rating 3 out of 5]

In terms of the quality of the photographs, this is not the most beautiful coffee-table book you’ll ever pick up. The best of the photos is the one adorning the back cover. A sprawling crab apple tree reaches hazy, unfocused branches above a trunk warmed by the late afternoon sun. It’s a moment of such peace that it’s a blow to realize that this is where Jennifer Levin was strangled to death by her boyfriend in 1986. There is much food for thought in the simple places captured by Sternfeld’s lens.

His unifying theme behind the collection of photos is that these landscapes are all somehow stained by violence. Some of the sites are chilling in their banality. From the dirt parking lot where Rodney King was beaten while 20 cops watched or the nondescript street in Queens where Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death over the course of half an hour while all her neighbors listened in horror and not one called the police, these are sites similar to the sorts of places we walk or drive by every day without ever noticing. The event that made them unique has not altered them in any noticeable way. It’s a sobering realization.

Sternfeld expands his definition of violence beyond one person with a weapon. Whether it’s Mount Rushmore, stolen from the Sioux Nation in 1868 after gold was discovered in the area or the parking lot where the Ohio National Guard shot four Kent State students to death, the American government takes blame for tragedies perpetuated in its name. The green house with its boarded-up windows only hints at what was lost when 500 families fled Love Canal, New York. The hearing room where the American Association of Blood Banks and the FDA rejected information that transfusions carried AIDS suggests all the other conference rooms where corporations deny evidence in order to keep their businesses lucrative.

I found the book amid the remainders at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan. I recommend you track down your own copy to leave out on your coffee table. In his afterward, Sternfeld suggests that everyone could list sites of violence that influenced or impacted his or her life. The book will give you a glimpse of many of your own sites and leave you thinking about all of those not pictured here.

This review originally appeared in Morbid Curiosity #7.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. It's a photojournalist's documentation of photos taken at various important sites. I saw the exhibit many years ago at the Art Institute of Chicago and it was incredibly moving. The book doesn't capture the actual photos and the raw emotion accompanying them, as I remember being moved to tears in reading the notes accompanying the exhibit but it's fascinating to see the spots where history, for better or worse, has been made. THe locations are as diverse as the motel where Martin Luther King was shot as well as the nightclub in New York where a young man tried to punish his girlfriend by locking the exit doors to a nightclub and setting the place on fire. It is really a stop and think kind of book.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

very strange.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first saw this book as an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. Very interesting way of looking at violence in America.

[Yannick Thoraval · Rating 5 out of 5]

Captures the historical sublime, the connection we feel to a physical place where something important happened.