Joel Sternfeld - McLean, Virginia, December 1978
n: 1978, p: 2003
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

I like surprises and I love the ability of a photograph to catch you unawares and make you do a double take.

Joel Sternfeld is a master at being surprising. There’s nothing oblique about his image titled “McLean, Virginia, December 1978”. You could say the mystery is hidden in plain sight. It is cleverly constructed in such a way as to send you on a false track initially. You see pumpkins. Particularly for American viewers there’ll be strong associations immediately flooding their minds about Thanksgiving, harvest time, Halloween, pumpkin pie. This process of association seems to determine the pace at which the viewer then continues to discover more of the picture’s message. A fire suddenly interrupts the happy memories of trick-or-treating. The house seems to be on fire just as an afterthought. It gives the picture an almost dreamlike quality in so far as dreams often present completely different priorities to waking life. Pumpkins become vitally important while the dangers of a burning house appear only on the periphery. While the fire is alarmingly ferocious fanned by a strong wind and a longish exposure making it appear as a solid mass of orange, a fire crew is already attending to it. So we return to feeling safe. This particular detail of the image is relegated to something no more significant than the crackle of a log in a fireplace.

But the story doesn’t end here. We are now looking really closely and spot a fireman almost blending in with the pumpkins in his orange outfit - apparently deliberating over which one to buy to bring home to his family. The unease returns. There’s a house on fire and one of the fire crew has nothing better to do than buying pumpkins? Is the fire under control? Has the house been written off? The viewer comes away from the image bemused. All the clues are there, but the mystery is not resolved.

I’m not sure who first said that Sternfeld “explores the irony of human-altered landscapes in the United States”, but type his name into Google and you’ll find that sentence in connection with him on almost every hit. There’s definitely a sense of irony in this image. But rather than being cruel or bitter, it’s a sweet, gentle irony.

Lydia Polzer

Lydia Polzer’s prints Traintracks 1 and Bernauer Strasse are both available from the Gallery from just £19 + p&p.

In the first of a new ongoing series, Nova photographer Joseph Gerhard discusses a photograph that has a particular importance for him - his ’significant shot’.

Untitled by John Howard Griffin

Oddly enough, the first photograph I ever saw that made me realize the potential power of photography was not by someone primarily known as a photographer.

In 1970, when I was 18, John Howard Griffin published a book about the photography of Thomas Merton called A Hidden Wholeness. Griffin, who was well known at that point as the author of Black Like Me, had become close friends with Merton and would spend the later years of his life writing about and photographing the monk. Though most of the photos in the book were Merton’s, there were several that Griffin had taken at Merton’s cabin at the Abbey at Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery in Kentucky where Merton lived and worked. This was one of those photos and it just just stopped me in my tracks. It had a kind of vivid intensity that made it seem much more real and palpable than the things physically surrounding me. By that time, I’d already become familiar with the experience of looking at a mundane object—a door, a cup on a table, a metal bucket on the grass—and suddenly have it appear clear and present, as though I’d never seen anything like it before.

This was the first time I realized that photography could communicate that experience exactly. The way the light coming from the window could give a palpable texture not only to the kettle and pot on the stove, but also to the wisp of steam in the air, literally took my breath away. It was what Emily Dickinson called “a certain slant of light”. And I found that effect heightened by the fact that the pill bottle and jar of instant coffee were included in the frame, rather than edited out.

Later, I learned a lot more about the technical side of photography as well as the work of photographers that had the biggest impact on me—Eugene Atget, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Minor White, Harry Callahan, Emmet Gowin—but this photo by John Howard Griffin is still the touchstone that reminds me why I became interested in photography in the first place.

Joseph Gerhard

Joseph’s print ‘Landing’ is available from just £19+p&p.