Picturing History, Picturing Absence: Photography and the Contemporary Landscape

Kate Palmer Albers offers historians a unique apporach to ways in which photographs might be incorporated into their understanding of the cultural construction of historical landscapes.  Albers explores a photographic project by American Joel Sternfeld in which he revisits the sites of violent crime across the United States, ranging from national tragedies such as Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis and the bombed Federal Building in Oklahoma City to lesser known horrors such as the kidnapping of a young girl in Des Moines or a devastating night club fire, set by arson, in the Bronx. Throughout On This Site, one is struck by the ordinariness, and even occasional beauty, of the landscapes, now unrecognizable as sites of past violence.