Critical Mass Books

SURFLAND

Joni Sternbach
2007
No longer available.

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.

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.

– Philip Prodger, Curator of Photography, Peabody Essex Museum

Hardbound, 80 pages, 52 photographs, cloth/embossed image on cover