Joel Sternfeld: Our Loss - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Joel Sternfeld's photographs of the scene of environmental activist David Buckel's self-immolation

In the early morning of 14 April 2018, David Buckel walked into Prospect Park in Brooklyn and set himself alight. He was a distinguished attorney whose work to secure social justice and LGBT rights had won national acclaim. At the time of his death at the age of 60 Buckel had left the practice of law and was working on a community farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

In an email sent to the New York Times moments before his death, Buckel decried the increasing pollution of the earth. He expressed the hope that his death by fossil fuels would encourage others to be better stewards of the earth. Joel Sternfeld happened to be in Prospect Park on that day with his nine-year-old son. Returning the next day, he began to document the gradual regeneration of the site as a means to honor the hope that climate change might be reversed. Our Loss is the latest book by Sternfeld on the effects of climate change, following Oxbow Archive (2008) and When It Changed (2008).

Review Quotes

Our Loss, is the most moving and important photobook I have come across in a long while. The reading of this book should be preceded and followed by a minute of silence to think about how egocentrism and ecocentrism are dangerously intertwined.--Federica Chiocchetti "Lensculture"

The site of Buckel's horrific death appears eerily mundane in Sternfeld's cycle of images. Sternfeld documents both the hopefulness of natural renewal, made vivid in the pink hues of a cherry tree, and the ease with which the traces of Buckel's trauma fade away.--Madeleine Pollard "Financial Times"

Through his sustained attention, Sternfeld creates both a meditation on the gravity of Buckel's sacrifice and a record of nature's cycle.--Chris Wiley "New Yorker"

Topographic approaches can sometimes be so wrapped up in form, repetition and consistency that it is bereft of emotion. But that's not the case here. There is a weight hovering over all of the elements in [Sternfeld's] photos that injects them with a deep sense of humanity.--Kenneth Dickerman "Washington Post"