By Janet Sternburg
On Friday, February 17 at 5pm at the Teatro Santa Ana, writer and photographer Janet Sternburg will present her journey of “falling up the stairs” – her phrase for beginning a new art in midlife in San Miguel, where she visited for decades, and now where she makes her home. Self-taught as a photographer, she describes falling up the stairs as a fall to freedom – from other people’s practices to her own vision of using low tech cameras without manipulation to capture the multiple layers of experience within a moment. One of Sternburg’s most-loved quotes is from poet Antonio Machado, “There is no path. You make the path as you walk.” For her Biblioteca presentation, she will show images of her work as well as talk about the creative process with her composer and friend Ken Bichel. There will be a question & answer period.
A writer from an early age, Sternburg’s life in photography began in 1999 when she finished “Phantom Limb,” her memoir that Bill Moyers has called “the perfect metaphor for life.” Needing a break from living with the past, she sought it in San Miguel where one day, to her surprise, she found herself looking into a window and saying to herself, ‘I want to take a photograph.” From that moment, falling up the stairs has taken her to solo exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world, from Berlin to Korea, Los Angeles to New York, as well as to the publication of three books of her photography.
Sternburg is also the author of the classic “The Writer on Her Work,” about which Julia Alvarez writes in a preface to the 20th anniversary edition, “It was a first, women laying claim to a room of their own in the mansion of literature.” Other books include “White Matter: A Memoir of Family and Medicine, and Optic Nerve: Photopoems,” in which she places photographic images within the body of a poem. Director Wim Wenders, writing the foreword to “Overspilling World: The Photographs of Janet Sternburg” says, “Her work makes you understand the act of seeing in a new way.”
Sternburg has a “secret,” as described by the 2018 Milano Photofestival: “The stylistic secret to Sternburg’s work is the ability to grasp the incessant flow of vitality of everyday life… to restore the fullness of life.” Janet Sternburg believes that this is not a secret in San Miguel, home to the perennial creative spirit, to second chapters and expansive visions.
Websites: Photography: www.janetsternburgphoto.com
Literature: www.janetsternburg.com
Presentation
“Falling up the stairs”, with Janet Sternburg
Fri., Feb. 17, 5pm
Teatro Santa Ana
Relox 50-A, Centro
100 pesos donation www.teatrosantaana.org
