March 20–27, 1997

book quarterly

Scene Of The Crime

A new book of photographs traces the residue of violence in ordinary landscapes.

By David Warner

Taylor Hall Parking lot, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, May 1994. — President Nixon's decision on April 30, 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, Jefferey 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.

The photographs in Joel Sternfeld's On This Site seem at first glance to be beautiful nonentities — finely crafted visual records of unremarkable places.

Then you read the accompanying text, and discover:

— that the aggressively ordinary carport interior is the place where a Louisiana homeowner shot and killed a Japanese exchange student in 1992, assuming him to be an intruder;

— that the leafy city street with the Olde English shopfronts is the Queens, NY, block where neighbors heard but did not act upon the screams of stabbing victim Kitty Genovese in 1964;

— that the gnarled crabapple tree, shining red-gold and leathery in the sunlight, is the tree in Central Park under which the body of Jennifer Levin was discovered after she was strangled by her date, Robert Chambers, in 1986.

The site of the Levin killing became part of the inspiration for On This Site, explains Sternfeld in his afterword. A New Yorker, he knew the location well (it's right behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and in 1993 he felt compelled to photograph it — partly in memory of Levin, and partly as a way of making sense of the increase in violence that he'd sensed in the United States since returning from a year in Rome. In showing the photo to friends, he found that there were many people like him who still couldn't pass the tree without thinking of what happened there, and he realized that he had within him "a list of places that I cannot forget because of the tragedies that identify them." So he set out to photograph these places — to help himself understand and to help others remember.

He was driven, too, by his own memories of loss — including the death of his brother Gabriel in an auto accident. Visiting (and photographing) the suburban street where Cari Lightner was hit and killed by a drunk driver (her mother, Candy Lightner, later founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving), he realized that in some way he was associating her death with Gabriel's.

"Iknow what it's like to get that phone call that forever changes your life," he said in a recent interview. "I wanted people that lost others to know that they are not alone."

In most cases, these sites betray no evidence of the events associated with them. Even places that have taken on historical significance — like the parking lot at Kent State, or the roadside where Rodney King was beaten — remain resolutely ordinary. But it is just this everydayness, as captured by Sternfeld, that makes his pictures so powerful. They provide forceful reminders that these acts of violence, many of them almost mythic by now, affected real people in real places. Sternfeld's photos hit home.

"It's funny, but in a way the place itself becomes very important in so many of these events," he says. "The facts have been sensationalized. The simple truth — this is the place — having that one bit of certainty allows you to have your emotions in a way that all of the verbiage doesn't."

Sternfeld, who has previously deepened the genre of landscape photography in his books American Prospects and Campagna Romana: The Countryside of Ancient Rome, acknowledges that the sites he chose to photograph are "a highly personal list." Some of the choices are obvious (the aftermath of Waco, the motel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated), some not so (the St. Louis rowhouse where a little boy died in drug-battle crossfire, a story he heard about in a 30-second news snippet on NPR). He took a photo of the MOVE block in Philadelphia, he says — "it was one of the first places I covered" — but it didn't hold up visually. And he's always asked why he didn't include John Lennon.

"The answer is I really don't know — certain places continue to resonate for me, while others didn't. I didn't want [the book] to become a set piece in which all expectations were met."

Some of the photos force a reconsideration of what is meant by "violence " — the unfinished Estrella housing development, for instance, abandoned when Charles Keating's S? folded, taking the life savings of 22,000 depositors with it.

"I wouldn't be upset if someone faulted me on the inclusion of Estrella, but I would be if it didn't lead to discussion of how we treat ourselves as a society." After all, he asks, "how many of those 22,000 elderly investors lost their lives in a real sense when the bank collapsed?"

Sternfeld had originally thought he might photograph places where acts of decency took place as well as the sites of violent crimes. "But it didn't work emotionally — it sort of demeaned the memory of people that were lost in these events."

Still, he points out, even the photos he took might have been given different labels than the ones he gave them — a record of happier moments, or, conversely, of other crimes.

"Every picture only tells part of the story. I'm giving you one text... but there are other things that occurred at these places."

"When I was making the photo of where Rodney King was beaten, a homeless man came out to ask what I was doing. 'I thought you were here because of the murder,' he said. 'There was a murder here two nights ago.'"

The process of photographing and compiling On This Site took two and a half years, says Sternfeld, and it was never less than grueling.

"It took over my life, and it wasn't a pleasant taking-over," he says. "I never had a good day doing this."

Now he needs a break. His next project? Perhaps a book about American utopias, looking at the ideal of a perfect world.

"As we enter a period of global laissez-faire, maybe it's time to reconsider the idea of treating the world well."

The photos in the book are arranged chronologically according to the events commemorated, except for the final photo. It's a picture of a red-carpeted, drop-ceilinged common room with nothing in it but a few couches — located inside an L.A. mosque, it's the room in which the rival gangs the Bloods and the Crips signed a truce in April 1992.

Including the photo as a coda, with its message of bittersweet hope, was "a bit of an afterthought," says Sternfeld. "It was a memorable day in my life to sit in a room with Bloods and Crips who a year or two earlier would have killed each other, and now you had to be there to see it — the camaraderie between them."

"It was wrong perhaps to show the empty room. Maybe I should have shown them in it."

On This Site: Landscape In Memoriam, by Joel Sternfeld, Chronicle Books, 112 p., 52 full-color photographs, $45 (cloth), $27.50 (paper)