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| Hart Island by Joel Sternfeld and Melinda Hunt was published by Scalo, 1999. |
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| Other articles by Fiona Kearney |
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| James Smith, February 1992 |
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| Hart Island |
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| Situated on Long Island Sound, north of Manhattan and east of the Bronx, Hart Island is the densest cemetery in America. It is a 'potter's field', a burial ground for the unclaimed or impoverished dead of New York City. The site has been a graveyard since the American Civil War, when both Union and Confederate soldiers were interred there. A monument on the island records the location of the Union cemetery but barely any trace exists of the thousands of other lives laid to rest on its hundred acres. |
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| Installation artist, Melinda Hunt, and documentary photographer, Joel Sternfeld, have collaborated on a project to archive and document these lost graves, now published in a book, tracing the hidden histories of the island that History would otherwise have us forget. This recovery of forgotten pasts is a prevalent concern of much contemporary art, which itself marginalized, seeks to reinstate other peripheral narratives into mainstream discourse. The Hart Island project does just this. Through installation, photography and the written word, the artists have constructed a remarkable testimony to the layers of history shored up on this island. Indeed, one of the most extraordinary aspects of this collaboration is just how many markers of America's past the artists found on this almost abandoned strip of land. The island is currently the least developed property area in New York but has previously housed a prison workhouse for delinquent boys, a charity hospital, an insane asylum, a tubercularium, a disciplinary barracks and a Nike Missile base. It was also the proposed site for a 'Negro Coney Island', an amusement park never completed because city officials felt it would corrupt the juvenile delinquents in care there. |
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| The vestiges of institutional life remain: the dilapidated shell of the Boy's Workhouse and the crumbling facade of the Butcher Shop. These buildings are the deserted monuments of the island's past but they are not the overriding images of the book. Rather, the vacant spaces set the tone for Sternfeld's visual account of the burial process which takes place on the island today. Under the supervision of prison correction officers, inmates serving short-term sentences on nearby Riker's Island are ferried in daily to carry out the manual burial tasks. Sternfeld's photographs contrast the institutional anonymity of the prisoners in their regulation outfits with the more poignant obscurity of the unknown lives stacked in the shallow graves; the coffins are no more than bare wooden crates with a name hastily marked in large handwriting across the side. |
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| Most of the pictures are set in the winter months and the muted palette of the barren landscape reflects the sombre world of Hart Island. Even those photographs taken at springtime are devoid of any bright colour and only Long Island Sound on a Summer Day, introduces a vivid sky blue, almost surreal in its contrast with the other scenes in the book. The photographs are perhaps deliberately reminiscent of the dark greeny brown tones of early nineteenth century landscape painting. The positioning of the prisoners, required to hold a stance for a slow shutter speed, gives the photographs a formal aspect which further aligns the work with Realist paintings of slaves or labourers at work on the land. Here, Sternfeld lays claim to a tradition of representation which in America extends back to the painter Benjamin West. The photographs then, visually evoke the history of Hart Island. Perhaps it should be questioned though why the prisoners themselves are passive to this project and consigned only to a performative role in relation to the land. It is only in Melissa Hunt's essay that the prisoners are given a voice. They express their concern over the fate of those buried on Hart Island, a determination to escape the anonymity of the trench graves and above all, a desire to be remembered. This very human hope underpins the book. Sternfeld's photographs are both a commemoration of the countless lives ended on the island and a meditation on mortality, the passing of time and nature's turning and regeneration - perennial themes which find a profound resonance in the landscape of Hart Island. |
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| Fiona Kearney |
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