On This Site
Description
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.
Books
On This Site
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Writings
On This Site Afterword
A cemetery in Fair Oaks, California, a Sierra foothills suburb of Sacramento. Although it's a cool, gray, mid-January morning, the magpies are so active that one is forced to think of spring. I've come to visit the grave of Cari Lightner, a young girl who was run over by a drunk driver in 1980. Being here has particular meaning for me; my brother Gabriel was killed in an automobile accident. In my mind, I have associated her death with his.
As I wander, I see other graves. “Beloved and Loving, Married 74 years.” He died at 100; she at 102. One man has a picture of his Harley engraved on his tombstone. Another reads: “Cha Cha Grandma.” What does that mean? Was “Cha Cha” a family way of saying good-bye? Is what we are at the end ultimately what we are?
In front of me, a green copper marker from the 1930s reads “OUR BOY.” I remember my father crying “my boy, my boy” for my older brother Andrew who died of leukemia when he was eleven and I was ten. Across the way is a black tombstone; an etched portrait shows a young man of twenty, the inscription tells me: “Patrick bravely battled leukemia for two years.”
In grief, we compose these terse life summaries and elegiac messages… but for whom? What other words are so intimate and so public? Carved in stone to withstand wind and time, they speak to immortality; they console those who wish for consolation; they give pause to a stranger.