Joel Sternfeld - On This Site
Joel Sternfeld’s book, On This Site, is a powerful and devastating collection of photographs he took relating to events where tragedies have occurred. The images are paired with text that defines the location and describes a particular event that has happened or related to this space. The places he photographs relate to events varying from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. One event in particular is paired with this photograph…
Taylor Hall Parking Lot, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, May 1994
President Nixon’s decision on April 30th, 1970, to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia incited protests throughout the nation. At Kent State University, demonstrators took over the campus and burned the ROTC building.
On May 4, at 12:24 p.m., twenty eight Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on students for thirteen seconds, killing Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, William Schroeder, and Sandra Scheuer in this parking lot.
Nine years later, without acknowledging wrongdoing, the State of Ohio paid the parents of each dead student $15,000.
It’s an interesting pairing with the photograph that Sternfeld had taken. That spark that the students had to go burn down the building and protest Nixon’s decision, does it reflect in the photograph with the sunset/sunrise shining over the same parking lot with the memorial commemorating the students who gave their lives for this cause? This may be far-fetched, but there is something quite powerful and beautiful about the image Sternfeld has taken and to me it reflects on those courageous actions that students took up.
With this book I felt like I was pacing through it, not only because the information that was given, but the images really define that space. That separation between the text and photographs may be a year to a century but the presence is still held there whether its because the community has held up a memorial or the text that is given to me, it still holds an amount of sensitivity of the subject that touches me.
Another spread from his book that impacts me just the same way was…
Within this spread is a gruesome story that goes along with it,
Central Park, north of the Obelisk, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 1993
Jennifer Levin and Robert Chambers were seen leaving Dorrian’s Red Hand, an Upper East Side bar, at 4:30 a.m. on August 26, 1986. Her body was found beneath this crab apple tree in Central Park at 6:15 a.m. that same morning.
An autopsy revealed that she had been strangled. She was eighteen years old when she died. Chambers, who was nineteen at the time of the crime, pleaded guilty to first - degree manslaughter.
A devastating story to such a delicate photograph, again it is an odd pairing and this happens multiple times throughout Sternfelds’ book which keeps you questioning his motives in photographing for these stories.
In Sternfeld’s statement he brings up an interesting point about his attention to this work, “…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.”
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