Artist Research: Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld earned a BA from Dartmouth College and is currently a professor of photography at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Sternfeld began documenting the relationship between humans and the land they inhabit with his first book, “American Prospects”, in 1987. Someone recently suggested that if I had never seen his work I should look it up. The artists name didn’t sound familiar however as soon as I found a website with his work I recognized one photograph immediately. The photograph is of a roadside vegetable stand where someone is selling pumpkins in the rural countryside of McLean, Virginia. The encompassing fall landscape and banal little stand would seem to be picturesque except for a house that is becoming completely engulfed in flames less than fifty feet away. I was also familiar with some images from his abandoned railway series in New York however, I had not ever heard of “On This Site: Landscapes in Memoriam”, published in 1997. In this book Sterfeld examines the land where recent violent crimes had been committed in America. The first example I could find of this series is a photograph of a small mint green house, the windows and doors are boarded up, and there is not a trace of recent human interaction within this environment. With much of Sternfeld’s work, including this image, he employs a certain deadpan approach to the camera. The title of this photograph is the name of the street and the date on which the picture was taken. The accompanying text to these images states simply, “From the 1920’s to the 1950’s, the city of Niagara Falls, the United States Army, and the Hooker Chemical Corporation dumped over 200 different toxic chemicals into Love Canal”. The straightforward narration of the photograph through its title, mimic the image in that it is both informative and uncomplicated. In another picture we see the front yard of a rundown apartment building in St. Louis Missouri, where nine year old Christopher Harris was grabbed from the steps in front of his home, and used as a human shield in a drug related gun shooting. The boy was shot and fatally wounded in this nondescript yard. On September 3, 1991 a fire swept through the Imperial Food Products chicken processing plant in Hamlet North Carolina during work hours. 56 were injured and 25 employees died because of illegally locked exits. Survivors from that day later stated that the doors were kept locked by management to keep employees from stealing chickens. Sternfeld’s photograph of this site focuses on one of these doors from the outside. It is painful to imagine that at the time of the fire people probably rushed to this door in a panic only to realize that they could not exit there. There is something awful in the mundane-ness of each of these sites. More than anything these pictures capture the horrible truth of how uninvolved and apathetic we’ve become as Americans to the stories that make up our landscape.