NEW WORKS: Joni Sternbach

About

American artist Joni Sternbach was born in the Bronx and is a native New Yorker. She is a Visiting Artist at Cooper Union School of Art and faculty member at the International Centre of Photography and The Penumbra Foundation in New York, where she teaches wet plate collodion. Sternbach uses early photographic processes to create contemporary landscapes and environmental portraits and her work centres on man’s relationship to water. Her long-term projects involve the pursuit and understanding of the Western landscape and the series Surfland, which features tintype portraits of surfers. The photographs are a unique blending of subject matter and photographic technique. Joni works with large-format cameras and the historic wet-plate collodion process that must be prepared and developed on location. The raw quality and immediacy of collodion suits my subject matter, giving it a distinctive appearance and echoing important traditions of nineteenth-century anthropological photography.

Joni Sternbachs’ work is included in many public collections, with recent acquisitions from the Joslyn Art Museum, Harn Museum, MOCA, Jacksonville and National Portrait Gallery in London. She is the recipient of several grants and prizes including the Clarence John Laughlin award, NYFA and 2nd prize winner in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize competition 2016. Her monograph, Surf Site Tin Type was published by Damiani Editore in March 2015.