Joel Sternfeld's empty places

Joel Sternfeld's series, entitled '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. Sternfeld set out to record photographically some sites of previous violence in the American landscape from May 1993. He traveled throughout the US over a period of three years making fifty-two color photographs that were exhibited as large-format prints and published together as a book. The photographs, made between 1993 and 1996, picture sites of violence that had occurred in a time span ranging from several decades earlier and spread to the events that happened only after he began the series.