"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 I showed 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 identify them, and I began to wonder if each of us has such a list. I set out to photograph sites that were marked during my lifetime. Yet, there was something else that drew me to this work. I think of it as the question of knowability. Experience has taught me again and again that you can never know what lies beneath a surface or behind a façade. Our sense of place, our understanding of photographs of the landscape is inevitably limited and fraught with misreading."

Joel Sternfeld, geboren 1944 in New York, gilt als einer der bedeutendsten Fotografen der Gegenwart. Im Steidl Verlag erschienen seine letzten beiden Bücher: Walking the High Line über eine aufgegebene Hochbahnlinie in Manhattan, die sich zu einem parkartigen Biotop entwickelt hat, sowie Treading on Kings, eine Dokumentation über Demonstranten beim G8-Gipfel der größten Wirtschaftsnationen in Genua. Zu Sternfelds zahlreichen Auszeichnungen zählen zwei Guggenheim Fellowships und der Prix de Rome.