Joel Sternfeld's Empty Places

The impulse to make a photograph of an event that has already happened may seem counterintuitive, if not impossible. Unlike a painter or draftsperson who may recreate a historical scene, the photographer has no such visual leeway. Joel Sternfeld’s series, On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam, is a reflection on the relationship of photographs and places to the telling of history and a provocative solution to what might otherwise be perceived as a deficit or limitation of the photographic medium. Beginning in May 1993, Sternfeld set out to record photographically some sites of previous violence in the American landscape. The New Yorker traveled the country over a three-year period, ultimately making fifty-two color photographs that were exhibited as large-format prints and published together as a book.¹ The photographs, made between 1993 and 1996, picture sites of violence that had occurred in a time span ranging from several decades prior all the way up until events that happened only after he began the series. Ultimately, by combining text and image, Sternfeld examines the temporal and indexical limits of a photographically produced narrative while still insisting on the affective power of the photograph to convey meaning.²

On This Site came to include places associated with such high-profile moments of violence as the rural grocery store—dilapidated and overgrown with trees—where fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped and killed forty years before in 1955; the crabapple tree where Jennifer Levin was strangled in New York’s Central Park in 1993; the ordinary vacant lot within a townscape where 168 people were killed in the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995; and a typical L.A. street corner where in 1991 police officers beat Rodney King at the conclusion of an eight-mile high-speed chase. But Sternfeld defines both violence and the places associated with it broadly. The series also includes, for instance, a photograph of the rocket testing facility in Utah where the critical failing part in the space shuttle Challenger’s 1986 explosion was tested, and a photograph of the exquisite landscape at the site of the former Heart Mountain Relocation Center internment camp in northern Wyoming. In these cases, violence is not defined by the single moment or action of an individual, but a complex and drawn-out series of all-too-human mistakes and misjudgments, or of profound human injustice. The nondescript character of the historic sites of violence makes the memories of the actions that took place there all the more potent.

Indeed, these two latter photographs demonstrate the breadth of Sternfeld’s interests—aesthetically, historically, and conceptually. His photograph at Heart Mountain conveys a conventionally beautiful landscape: viewers are treated to a low afternoon sun filtering through clouds above the remarkable geologic formation of Wyoming’s Heart Mountain. Two buildings—evidently abandoned or poorly maintained—frame the foreground, visually leading the viewer through the remote landscape. Yet the text may jolt a viewer from contemplative reverie: it informs us that what the photograph does not (cannot) reveal, describe, or explain is the World War II–era forced relocation of over 100,000 Japanese American citizens, and the decades-late yet ultimately meager apology by the United States to the survivors or their descendants.

By contrast, the photograph Sternfeld made at the Morton Thiokol Rocket Testing Facility in Promontory, Utah, rests not on a romantic landscape aesthetically at odds with its difficult history but on another aesthetic and conceptual impasse. Here the visual record of a seemingly matter-of-fact beige low-rise building set by the side of a road in an unassuming arid landscape evokes a sense of harmlessness, underscored by the signs proclaiming the company’s attention to safety. Yet the text reveals it to be the origin site of a chain of managerial events with grievous but all-too-preventable consequences for the crew members of the space shuttle Challenger.

In both photographs, as in the series as a whole, Sternfeld’s aesthetic revolves around a visual and conceptual impasse between what is revealed through the photograph and what emerges in the text. Again and again the point is made: the physical world, and visual records of it, are deeply limited in what they can convey about history, and yet those images can produce highly affective modes of engaging with unseen histories.

In May 1994, Sternfeld traveled to Niagara Falls, New York, where he made one of the most poignant images in the series. Rather than training his lens on the iconic falls, Sternfeld went to the Love Canal neighborhood and photographed a small house in a state of disrepair. Set centrally within the photographic frame, the modest house seems to assert itself into our view. A mossy asphalt walkway leads to the home’s diminutive concrete stoop. The front door and windows are boarded over, and the white plastic awnings adorning the front of the house are worn down, the one over the door sagging with age. The simple gray asphalt shingle roof is bound by rain gutters that overflow with the detritus from the trees around the house. Weathered pale green wooden siding clads the exterior of the house: the peeling paint on both the siding and the concrete of the home’s foundation indicates that the house was either poorly maintained or has fallen into a state of disrepair since being abandoned.

The number 518 peeks from the shadow of the front door’s awning, a physical address that conjures directions given to visitors of the former residents, mail delivery, and the comings and goings of an occupied home. The diffuse light offers a blank mood for Sternfeld’s discordant symphony of green: the pale green of the exterior is sickly beside the surrounding lawn and trees, both as currently untended as the home. The photograph invites visual engagement: attentive viewers are rewarded with subtle plays of color, light, and an evocatively vague sense of absence or abandonment. But if the sum total of the visual elements tells viewers anything, it is that they do not know the whole story.

Sternfeld pairs the Love Canal photograph with a brief text that recounts the blunt facts of the now unseen history that has brought us to the present. As such, the artist addresses the disconnect between a series of terrible events and the relative tranquility of its site as it appears decades later. In this pairing, as throughout the series, the text is crucial to establishing a link to the past, as the image alone is resolutely mute about the history to which it refers. And its tone is as important as its content: the phrasing is matter-of-fact but not cold, factual without sounding like a police report.

Where the photograph may be suggestive yet indeterminate, the details of the text anchor the scene to harrowing fact. Viewers of Sternfeld’s photograph have textual confirmation of the image’s sickly qualities: the house comes to stand for the plight of a neighborhood and the aftermath of moral (if not legal) crimes. We read about Hooker Chemical Corporation’s actions and stipulations, connect Lois Gibbs and her children’s blood disorders to this home, and extrapolate outward to the other displaced families, their sicknesses, and boarded-up homes across Love Canal. Crucially, the text serves as a temporal expansion of the moment of the photograph to flesh out the backstory of how the present state unfolded. In this case, it was over the course of decades involving several organizations and hundreds of people. What photograph could convey this story?

Sternfeld’s subject, it becomes clear, is the recognition of an essentially nonphotographable complexity. Photographs have an extraordinary capacity to make us look and to direct our attention, but the images themselves cannot reconstruct the history. About this series, Sternfeld commented, “Experience has taught me again and again that you can never know what lies beneath a surface or behind a façade. Our sense of place, our understanding of photographs of the landscape is inevitably limited and fraught with misreading.”

In the Love Canal photograph and text combination, as with the other photo/text pairs throughout the series, Sternfeld confronts photography’s and the landscape’s complex relationships to the process of reconstructing history. By extension, we recognize that though the image stops a place in time, Sternfeld’s poignant photograph is just one moment of the ongoing development of this site. Indeed, the place Sternfeld pictured in 1994 has changed substantially.

His titles guide us to specific locations: here, 518 101st Street, Niagara Falls. Typing the address into Google Street View reveals the subsequent change of the now nearly twenty years since Sternfeld’s photograph. Where the little green house once stood, Street View now shows an empty grassy lot at 518 101st Street, indicating that the home has been razed. For those with the Love Canal neighborhood history, or even with Sternfeld’s photograph, the neighborhood’s empty lots on Street View stand as a reminder of the toxic waste and subsequent removal of the homes. While Sternfeld began the project as a consideration of photography’s relationship to history and place and a reminder of this country’s violent legacies—many of which go unmemorialized—now his photograph serves a more foundational function: as a visual record of a structure that has been literally demolished.