Gallery Editors' Note

摘要

Environmental historians, more than most scholars, think about the ways history literally takes place, that is, how physical sites inform our understanding of the past. Yet in this issue's Gallery essay, art historian Kate Albers uses Joel Sternfeld's 1990s photographic series, On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam, to interrogate the power of photographs to document historic places. Sternfeld juxtaposes innocuous scenes of buildings, trees, streets, or broad vistas with text that recounts the horrific events, both infamous and less well known, that once transpired there. In her essay, Albers analyzes the ways Sternfeld's photographs of sites of violence disarm viewers because the sites he depicts are so dramatically different from what we initially perceive them to be. Through these discrepancies, both she and Sternfeld critique the evidentiary powers of landscapes and photographs. In doing so, Albers challenges environmental historians to think about how they can make these places more legible themselves.