I've Been Walking
We are delighted to publicize I’ve Been Walking by author and photographer Janet Sternburg, forthcoming by Distanz this month.
About the book:
“I’m Drawn to Strange Juxtapositions.”
The writer, photographer, and philosopher Janet Sternburg (b. Boston, 1943; lives and works in Los Angeles and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico) makes work that captures the momentary flashes of sensory experience as well as the endurance through time of the world around us. In her most recent project, she has walked through Los Angeles during 2020 when the city appeared to be frozen in time but also revealed signs and traces of unruly ongoing life. The resulting photographs show apparently solid urban structures – facades, walls, garages, traffic lights – giving way to nature, human gestures, and the phantoms of light.
Bringing together abstraction and recognizable reality, the book is a visual poem of the everyday that shifts perceptions of space, perspective, and what is conventionally thought of as Los Angeles. I’ve Been Walking is Sternburg’s tribute and hymn to her city. It limns a world rich in metaphors that refuse to be reduced to a single meaning.
About the author:
Janet Sternburg is a polymath: an artist of photography, a writer of literary books, a maker of theatre and films, an educator, all in the service of a singular vision which has always been at the forefront of cultural change. Since 1998 when she began taking photographs, her work has appeared in a portfolio in Aperture (2002), and that same year in a cover story and portfolio in Art Journal. Her photography has been exhibited in solo gallery shows in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Milan, as well as at cultural institutions in Mexico and Seoul, Korea where she received a commission for a full-building installation using projection and multiple monitors. A monograph of her photographs, Overspilling World: The Photographs of Janet Sternburg, was published in 2016-17 by Distanz Verlag with a Foreword by Wim Wenders. In 2018, the USC Fisher Museum of Art presented her solo show, LIMBUS.
