Joel Sternfeld

"I went to Central Park to find the place behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art where Jennifer Levin had been killed.It was bewildering to find a scene so beautiful ... to see the same sunlight pour down indifferently on the earth. As Ishowed the photograph of this site to friends, I realized that I was not alone in thinking of her when walking by the Met.It occurred to me that I held something within: a list of places that I cannot forget because of the tragedies that identifythem, and I began to wonder if each of us has such a list. I set out to photograph sites that were marked during mylifetime. Yet, there was something else that drew me to this work. I think of it as the question of knowability. Experiencehas taught me again and again that you can never know what lies beneath a surface or behind a façade. Our sense ofplace, our understanding of photographs of the landscape is inevitably limited and fraught with misreading."