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What does it mean to photograph the site where something has happened? ...
Photographs of seemingly normal street scenes or areas of wasteland are given whole new meanings, often sinister, when it is revealed, usually through accompanying text, that they are the site of a tragic event or some other disturbance. ... These images have a subtle forensic appearance, and often look like something has happened there, they appear to be the scene of some form of crime. ... ” This is an interesting view, which could mean that every photograph taken of an urban landscape or area of a city, is in fact a photograph of a crime scene, every portrait of a ‘city-dweller’ a mug shot of a suspect, giving these pictures a whole new meaning.
Joel Sternfeld, in his book ‘On This Site’, has taken this idea and developed it with his use of factual, often ‘police report’ sounding text to reveal what the crime that occurred was. ... 3) appears to be a photograph of a small rubbish tip on some wasteland in the twilight hours of either dusk or dawn. ... “Seawright has said that he has always been fascinated by the invisible and the unseen, and this new work carries this forward, deriving its tension, its pulse, from what we cannot see –from what is past and what is out of the frame –to what is actually there but hidden, what is latent in the landscape, what is about to happen. ... In this ‘cold’ photography we can see that something has happened by what is denoted in the image (dead bodies, destroyed buildings, etc) but we don’t know what. We are left to imagine what has happened, what tragedy has struck. ... 7) is a deeply disturbing image of a corpse, who clearly didn’t die peacefully, but we are left not knowing exactly what happened to her. ... Does this aspect of us having to imagine what happened to this woman make it more disturbing than an image of her being killed? ... Photographs are taken as a ‘record’ of history, they are no longer used for ‘breaking news’, television has taken its place in this role. Photographs, in newspapers especially, represent ‘what has been’ rather than ‘what is happening’. ...
With the 1920s, came technological advancements giving photographers the ability to capture the action as it happened. ... This is something that is harder to achieve with television, “Is this a photograph or is this a continuous shot of an immobile scene? ... Meyerowitz was commissioned by the Museum of the City of New York to document the painful work of rescue, recovery, demolition and excavation, “My task is to make a photographic record of the aftermath: the awesome spectacle of destruction; the reverence for the dead; the steadfast, painstaking effort of recovery; the life of those whose act of salvation has embedded itself deeply into the consciousness of all of us in America and around the world …I felt if there was no photographic record allowed, then it was history erased.
Approximate Word count = 2247
Approximate Pages = 9
(250 words per page double spaced)
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