SurfLand
Cloth, embossed image on cover 80 pages, 52 photographs, essay by Phillip Prodger
Artist Joni Sternbach’s modern vision of shorelines and surfers is at once ephemeral and elemental in style and presentation. Using a large-format nineteenth-century-style view camera and a portable darkroom, Sternbach photographed surfers on New York and California shorelines. Sternbach makes her photographs in tintype, a labor-intensive technique little changed since it’s invention in the 1850s. Spontaneous and unpredictable, the streaks and tonal variations in the finished photographs reflect their hand-made character, the corners rubbed where they were held in the camera. and then made tintypes on the spot. Tintypes, created using a wet-plate technique, demand that chemicals be hand-applied, exposed and developed before the plate dries, and that the subject remain still.
Posing on rocky outcrops, in front of uprooted trees, or on thick mats of woody flotsam, Sternbach’s surfers inhabit strange landscapes. The best of Sternbach’s photographs convey insistent longing. They are about relationships – the relationship between surfer and board, between human and landscape, between photographer and subject, and between the surfers themselves...she has discovered a new sort of home – a place without walls, defined only by belonging and the physicality of existence.
SurfLand is also available in Limited Editions:
Edition of 50, signed and presented in a slipcase.
Edition of 20, signed and with an archival inkject print (choice of one of two prints) presented in a slipcase. View Print 09.07.26 #6 Valerie (listed below as Folio1) View Print 08.08.04 #5 Hawaiian Ed (listed below as Folio2)
Print image size is 7 x8 1/2' on 8 7/16 x 9 5/8' paper from a unique 8x10' tintype The slip cover is 9 1/8 x 10 3/8 x 1 1/8' outside dimension. The print is in the folio. Both folio and book fit inside slipcase.
Edition of 10, signed with a unique tintype (10 different images) and presented in a clamshell box.
Clark Gallery has an extensive inventory of Ms. Sternbach's work. Joni's work was the recent subject of a solo exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, curated by Phillip Prodger. Sternbach's work is widely exhibited and collected.