LUMINOUS VISIONS: JONI STERNBACH

LUMINOUS VISIONS: JONI STERNBACH by Galina KurlatJuly 15, 2025

This week on Lenscratch, we look at a selection of artists creatively engaging with analog photographic processes within their practice.

In her series Surfland, Joni Sternbach uses the historic wet collodion process to photograph surfers on location, capturing them within their natural environments. This process has often brought her to the liminal space between land and sea, a place explored in her previous series such as Abandoned and Sea/Sky, both photographed from the shoreline. These transitional spaces, where the earth meets the ocean, are places we often turn to for peace, reflection, and recreation. For Sternbach, however, they have also become sites of connection, where she has discovered a global community, a tribe of like-minded individuals.

Her practice has taken her around the world—to England, France, Australia, Uruguay, both coasts of the United States, and Hawaii. The performative nature of working with the wet collodion process in the field often invites spontaneous interaction; the act of creating the image itself draws a crowd. While her subjects pose with their boards in hand, these portraits go beyond a mere typological study of surfers. There is a striking intimacy and reverence in each image, a testament to Sternbach’s ability to reveal the humanity of her sitters.

Joni Sternbach and Vanessa Marsh recently presented a joint exhibition titled Western Wave at Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. The show brought together two artists whose practices explore the interplay between nature, time, and photographic processes. Sternbach’s wet collodion portraits of surfers share space with Marsh’s layered, atmospheric landscapes, offering viewers a dialogue between physical presence and liminal environments.

Images from the exhibition, along with press coverage, can be viewed here.

Instagram: @jstersurf

Joni Sternbach is a New York based artist who works with large format film, modern and historic lenses as well as early photographic processes to explore the present-day landscape and to make environmental portraits. Much of her work is centered around our relationship with water, and how as humans, we observe, relate to, and interact with the earth’s oceans. This connection also reveals itself in places like the high desert of western Utah, where a salt body of water remains. Because her work is so intrinsic to the absence and presence of connective bodies of water, it taps into issues like climate change and its accompanying effects. Her long-term projects involve the pursuit and understanding of the western landscape and the series SurfLand, which captures portraits of surfers in tintype.

Sternbach’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. Her most recent exhibition, Western Wave at Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco brings together a comprehensive selection of multi-panel and ultra-large format, western tintypes from the series Surfland. Her photographs are held in major international institutions: National Portrait Gallery, London, Maison Européenne de la Photographie and Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, France, The High Museum, LACMA, The Nelson-Atkins Museum, MoPA, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is the recipient of several grants and awards including MacDowell, NYFA, CAPS, the 2011 Clarence John Laughlin, and 2010 Santo Foundation awards.

She is founding faculty at Penumbra Foundation where she currently teaches and serves on their advisory board.

Her books include Surfland (2009), Surf Site Tin Type (2015), High Tide Montauk Point (2021) Kissing A Stranger (2022) and several artist books.

Surfland is an ongoing series of environmental portraits of wave riders captured on beaches around the globe. These unique tintype objects are created with a variety of large, and extra large-format cameras using the wet plate collodion technique, an antique process that must be prepared and developed on location. Like the Polaroid of the 19th century, the pictures are instantaneous.

My photographs are made in public space, combining theater and craft. My process is an immediate, and collaborative act with surfers, which mirrors the act of surfing itself. The dynamic between my subjects and myself is physical and fluid. Sitters watch their image emerge in the fixer immediately after it’s made, reinforcing the collaborative nature of the project. The event also draws spectators and entices new participants. Like individual wave rides, each one of my images is enhanced by varying and unpredictable conditions, such as the application of the collodion emulsion, the level of light, temperature and humidity.

Surfland has taken me to some of the world’s most celebrated surfing beaches. The beach has become my studio and my stage. Facing weather and tide, my subjects and I intersect at the periphery of two powerful elements: land and sea. I photograph surfers at the water’s edge in a brief moment of stasis- a pause on the way to or from the ocean. Surfers are an integral part of this transitional state, forming a palpable connection between the sea and shore. They are able to walk on water in the grandest sense and engage in the natural world with equal amounts of abandon and grace.