I

These photographs are born from an inexhaustible desire

to look;

to meditate on intention and accident;

to uncover the layers of experience within a moment;

to mingle inside and outside, solid and fluid;

to play with fertile confusion;

to be attentive to those moments when everyday reality becomes charged;

to respond to that charge

with images that convey elusive but potent meanings.

I have stood in these places and found these reflected images,

without manipulation,

with vision.

 

II

My photographs are not the result of digital
manipulation or double exposures. I stand in these
places and find these images. They are pictures of what
happens when one suspends conventional seeing.

I work with disposable and iPhone cameras, exploring their
special qualities, making prints as large as
sixty-six by forty-five inches.

As for focus, I’m not interested in depicting sharp
boundaries: razor-edge clarity does not represent how Iunderstand the world.

Instead, I want to mingle inside and outside; layer past and
present; create a fertile confusion sufficient to the richness

 

III

I use reflection to illuminate the protean in a particular way — to blur separations and put into question what we believe we already know. My practice is to look into store windows — not glossy commercial displays but unusual and compelling ones that I find in various parts of the world — and wait until the elements in front of me and behind me come together into a single image. Looking at my images, a viewer cannot tell what is inside, what is outside; what is solid and what is fluid. I call this intermingling ‘fertile confusion’ (the title of my recent show in Korea), a permeability that represents the manifold richness of mind and experience. Often I am asked whether the work has been made using double exposures or digital collage. These are not the cases. I stand in a set location and take these pictures; they are a sum of what are available to our eyes at the moment. In this regard, my work is one of demotic photography, that is, it is ‘of or pertaining to the ordinary, everyday, current form of a language; vernacular: a poet with a keen ear for demotic rhythms.’

Key to this exploration is the limitations of throwaway cameras. I began using a throwaway when I unexpectedly needed a camera and it was all I could obtain in a village plaza. The throwaway has turned out to give me images that I cannot get with any other camera. With the limitation of a preset focus and minimal depth of field, I can suspend conventional seeing. When we look into a store window, we often say to ourselves: ‘I like this, I don’t like that,’ or ‘This is important, this is not.’ The photographic equivalent is to focus on what is of interest while the less interesting recedes into softer focus. The throwaway disrupts this normative way of seeing. What we usually see as separated visual tangents is mingled on a single plane. Preferences disappear as does three-point perspective. Everything within the frame, then, is of interest and value.

fyi: I buy disposables wherever I happen to be, whatever kind is available, and I have them developed on the spot. (This is not the case when it comes to printing; I work closely with a master printer — see samples.) When I make prints (sometimes larger even than the 30” x 40”s of the samples), the images are not perfectly sharp, which is fine with me; razor-edge clarity is not how I see the world.

Instead I am interested in various kinds of interminglings, not only inside and outside, solid and fluid, but also personal and impersonal, natural and fabricated, and most especially past and present — how memory and history suffuse our current experience. In the Spring 2002 issue of Art Journal, editor Janet A. Kaplan discusses the role images play to memorialize the then-recent September 11^th attacks. About my work, featured in that issue, she writes, ‘While our country debates the efficacy of monuments to mark memory, such layered reflections with no one dominating image offer an intriguing model.’ I plan to go on looking for the photographic equivalents of the multiple and layered possibilities within a single moment.

This search is also an exploration of my own past. Remarking on artists’ relationship to their own past in a catalogue essay for my show in Berlin, cultural critic Joern Jacob Rohwer writes: ‘The overcoming of anxieties and the symbolic healing and reconciliation in using aesthetic means can be seen as an element linking the works of those artists who, in the second or third generation, stem from families that were refugees or victims of persecution. . . one can make it out in her (Sternburg’s) work like in that of other prominent artists whose image and text installations have similar symbolic effects, among them Christian Boltanski from France, Oz Almog from Israel, Jenny Holzer or Shimon Attie from the USA. . . . Janet Sternburg’s images can be understood as a school of seeing and an iconography of memory all at once.’

While I have taken photographs virtually all over the world, Mexico, where I live part of each year, is especially inspiring to me in its blurring of boundaries between past and present. Mexico’s complex mestizo history walks the streets daily, the indigenous Indian world mixing with the Hispanic Catholic one, all of it moving in a landscape where inside and outside often interpenetrate. I do not take folkloric or documentary photographs in Mexico; rather Mexico has become my way of seeing. I plan to go on exploring its everyday revelations of co-existing dimensions.

When I photograph, I layer. When I write, I juxtapose. In both, I am working with time. This brings me to clarify my relationship to photography and to writing. Twelve years ago, already with a professional life as a writer, I took a photograph; that image (Reflection in Blue, see samples) appeared in Aperture and was acquired for the permanent collection of The USC Fisher Museum where it appears in the catalogue, Insatiable Desires with commentary by curator Lillian Choy: ‘Sternburg’s photograph, a composed still life, suggests transience and mortality. Its contemplative mood is enhanced by the ultimate immateriality of the material things photographed. . . while time is halted in the picture, the viewer is not afforded the same temporal intermission.’ These comments indicate the link between the concerns in my photography and those in my writing: my memoir, Phantom Limb, is about the mysterious ‘presence’ that accompanies absence; so too are many of my poems in Optic Nerve: Photopoems, a book in which I literally integrate my photographs as visual stanzas.

I have discovered that taking photographs is natural and joyous for me, as is developing a personal and philosophical vision for my images. I am committed wholeheartedly to photography. In the future I may go on to experiment with other cameras, in other places, but I will always be ravished by the complexities of the everyday visual world and will always go on exploring it photographically.