Relics of the 21st century
Surf’s up: Joni Sternbach views modern wave riders through antique lenses.
Photography by Joni SternbachPure chemistry brought her out West. It was a humdrum day in Malibu when Joni Sternbach first set up her portable darkroom beside the Pacific, mounted her big mahogany box camera on a tripod, then settled in and waited for something organic to happen. A gull flew by. Later on: another one…. That was about it.
“It was dead out,” says Sternbach. So the New York-based photographer broke precedent, approaching people on the beach to talk about her SurfLand project, a series of handmade portraits created on location using a 19th-century method once known as “the black art.” “At first they’d see all my equipment, the umbrella,” she says, recalling some of the dubious looks. “The comments I’d get—‘Puppet show?’ ‘Hot dogs?’”
To encourage volunteer photo subjects, Sternbach did demos of her technique. A synchronicity of timing and temperature known as wet-plate processing, it entails framing a shot, coating a metal plate with collodion and immersing it in a bath of silver nitrate (the chemicals claim infamy for causing everything from explosions to skin stains, hence wet-plate’s early nickname), then popping the plate into the camera back, exposing it, and developing it before it dries.
“The first surfer in Malibu got so edgy waiting,” she says. “My exposures are long—up to three seconds—and wet-plate takes a minimum of four minutes.” Soon she met better prospects—a father with his young son, winsome twins sharing a longboard. With that, Sternbach began toting her vintage Deardoff camera up and down the coast, from Santa Cruz to Del Mar, capturing some of surfing’s legends (world champions like Linda Benson and Shaun Tomson) and, especially, the people at the heart of California’s surf communities.
“Standard surf photography is all about this hyper-masculine, superhero surfer coming at the viewer at 35 miles an hour. With Joni’s photos, there’s this inversion.”
“Sixty degrees is perfect for collodion,” says Sternbach, who teaches art at New York University and leads wet-plate workshops at Manhattan’s International Center for Photography. She started the portraits—a study in surfers as bridge between land and sea— near her home on Long Island, the evolution of a previous series about the nexus of sea and sky. “With land, you’re either conquering the land or conserving the land or making a statement about the land or how we inhabit the land…,” she says. “The ocean is more of an emotional visualization.” Her search for wet-plate-friendly climes with year-round surfing led her to California—an obvious choice and a turning point.
Sternbach now has a California gallery, and a book out, SurfLand (Photolucida). Represented by Edward Cella Art + Architecture in Los Angeles, she still seems surprised by the direction her work has taken—unlike Cella himself, who encouraged her to come out West. He first saw her Montauk surfers at a Miami art fair and was instantly transfixed. “Standard surf photography is all about this hyper-masculine, superhero surfer coming at the viewer at 35 miles an hour down the face of a wave,” he says. “With Joni’s photos, there’s this inversion. The figure has to be still. And she likes to categorize—her work is almost anthropological.”
Sternbach’s Santa Cruz subjects in fact look almost feral—burnished and sculpted by the elements. Her Santa Barbara surfers evoke innocence both socialized and primal. The Malibu crew exudes vestiges of Beach Party-era zaniness coupled with the wariness of urban sophistication. Yet there are commonalities between these groups—in particular, a sense of self-containment and connection with the environment, qualities perhaps fostered as much by the wet-plate process as by surf culture. “To be still for even one full second takes concentration—and will,” says the artist Hank Pitcher, who has surfed for 50 years and painted California’s beach communities for almost as long; who introduced Sternbach to several of her subjects. “Her surfers look focused and balanced because they have to be in order to stand still long enough for the exposure.”
Another Sternbach distinction, one that sets her apart from other photographers rediscovering wet-plate (reportedly as a backlash to digital technology), is her interest in surfers and landscape rather than cowboys, Civil War reenactments, cemeteries, and other popular choices that either coincide historically with the advent of the process or have some other overt link to the past.
Consider William, her portrait of 11-year-old William Powell at Rincon Point, a recent acquisition of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art: “This image has the feel of a treasured object,” says the museum’s photography curator, Karen Sinsheimer, of the collodion print. “It could almost be 19th century, but it has a timeless quality.” Through Sternbach’s lens, a boy stands resolute on a driftwood-strewn shore, an oasis of palms in the distance, surfboard as badge beneath his arm. While the board marks the setting as present-day, the image could easily be the relic of a post-digital age, a post-apocalyptic future—or even a futuristic fantasy. As is her wont, getting the shot was serendipitous—a real-time interaction of artist and subject.
“When I saw [Sternbach] on the beach with the box camera, I asked her if she would take my picture,” says Powell. “She was shooting all these other people so I came back later.” Powell enjoyed the photo session, then forgot about it until Sternbach sent him the portrait. In it, he appears to have Rincon all to himself. “It looks peaceful—and sort of surreal,” he notes of the tableau. “Usually at Rincon, it’s a bunch of old guys on their longboards who just want me to get out of their way. •
C Magazine
By Trish Reynales. All rights reserved.
