When the photographs presented themselves, Janet Sternburg discovered she could take them places.
Recently I gave a talk about beginning photography in midlife, entitling it Falling Up the Stairs, a phrase that has become important to me through the years. Now in my eighties, I want to celebrate this way of making art and of being alive, how going in the so-called wrong direction can become a fall to freedom.
The evening of that talk, the audience walked into the theater to a recorded version of “Stand By Me.” I chose the song because I hear two meanings in its lyrics. The first is when you ask another person to stand by you, especially during a hard time.
When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see. . .
The second meaning is when you ask yourself to stand by yourself. To be staunch and follow your own vision.
No, I won't be afraid.
Oh, I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me
Until my mid-fifties, I’d been living as a writer (always with day jobs since writing with rare exceptions doesn’t pay the rent). I’d already published The Writer On Her Work, on what it means to be a contemporary woman who writes. I’d commissioned these essays from other writers. For my next book, a memoir, I committed to my own words. Phantom Limb took me an almost ten years to write, draft after draft, until I ‘heard’ a mental click that told me I was done.
When the book was on its way to the publisher, I took myself to San Miguel de Allende, a small city in Central Mexico where my husband and I had bought a home there that needed repairs. It turned out I was the one who needed repair.
Each day I went for a walk, without a direction, no goal in mind.
I needed to feel what it was like to live without struggling to get words right. Suspended, I began to see the world around me. One day I saw a store window filled with intriguing old objects. I stopped to look and saw a sign hand-painted across the window, Gracias por Mirar. On the other side of the entrance, another window displayed that same phrase in English. Thank you for Looking. I felt those words as a message. Suddenly I wanted to take a photograph.
I walked to the main square where the only kind of camera I could find was a disposable, a.k.a. a throwaway. I went back and waited until a man on the sidewalk behind me was reflected in the window. I clicked.
When I got the photograph back a few days later (it was before the widespread use of digital photography with its immediate result), I was surprised to see a man on a roof who seemed to be hammering. I hadn’t noticed him when I took the photograph. How had he come to be there?
That was when I began to discover the special qualities of my rudimentary camera. I had been looking into a store window where not only was the man on the street behind me reflected but also the man on the roof of a building on the far side of the street. With only limited capabilities – without automatic focus, without depth of field – all the elements appeared on one plane. There was no way of knowing what was in front, what in back. Everything intermingled without sharp borders.
Razor-sharp clarity was a standard for so-called good photography in those years, but I liked the soft focus of my photograph. Well-meaning people who were disconcerted by blur and were made uncomfortable by indeterminate spaces asked me, “When are you going to get a real camera?” They were implying that better equipment would give me more control, and thus I would be closer to their definition of a professional. I replied, “I’m getting what I want this way.”
I don’t think I could have said that when I was younger, ready as I was to acquiesce to other people’s standards, their ideas for what I should do. Without my having planned it, I found that my work didn’t look like anyone else’s, which led to an extraordinary life in photography. That first image was acquired by a museum and I’ve gone on to mount solo exhibitions throughout the world. Three books of my photography have been published, each with my own essays, since I’ve not given up on my first love writing. But these days it’s photography that gives me greater joy, with its immediacy and opening outward to the world.
Through the years, I became interested in the brain and studied neurology with professor at UCLA. I realized that my images were similar to the way our minds work, how we don’t keep things separate but rather live in interconnection and flow. This understanding gave me further affirmation for what I was doing in photography, and for my belief that we don’t need artificial and harmful divisions.
In the beginning, I had discovered how to turn the camera’s shortcomings into strengths, and other people’s skepticism into a new way of seeing and thinking.
Falling up the stairs in the ‘wrong’ direction turned out to be right. I recently collaborated on a new book with a Mexican friend, the entire book in English and Mexican Spanish. I’m at work now on a fourth book, a compilation of images I come upon of odd and useless things, a welcome late-life shift to pure delight.
I stood by myself, fell up the stairs, and became my own artist and my own person.
Janet Sternburg is a is a fine art photographer, author, a maker of theatre and films, and an educator. She lives in Downtown Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She has been the recipient of many grants, fellowships and artist residencies, among them, from the Djerassi Resident Artist Program and The MacDowell Colony. She has taught in the Graduate Media Program at the New School University, and in the Critical Studies School at the California Institute of the Arts. In 2022 she was a winner of the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, accompanied by a group exhibition at the Barcelona Biennial.
Learn more at her websites:
Photography: www.janetsternburgphoto.com
Writing: www.janetsternburg.com
Images courtesy of Janet Sternburg
Love this and at 73, it resonates!
Wonderful tale of anti culture. Congratulations