Metro Bus Shelter, 7th Street at E Street, Southwest Washington, DC, April 1995, by Joel Sternfeld.
Usually, I prefer images to stand by themselves. My aesthetic sensibility doesn’t look kindly on photographs that rely heavily on explanatory context: I feel it’s cheating. A good picture is a good picture. If the picture doesn’t give you an interesting experience by just looking at it, it’s probably no good. However! Every preference has its exceptions. One of these exceptions, I think, is Joel Sternfeld’s series On this site (or what I’ve seen of it, anyway). Sternfeld photographed scenes of various tragedies some time after they happened: deadly fires, murders, vast pollution, criminal neglect. Accompanying the pictures, which by themselves look plain, at times idyllic, are pithy texts explaining what happened “on this site”. Here’s the text that accompanies the above picture:
Yetta M. Adams froze to death sitting upright in this bus shelter across from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, DC, on November 29, 1993. The forty-three-year-old mother of three grown-up children had reportedly been turned away from a homeless shelter the night before.Sep 24, 2010
