There is something special in the way a woman looks at the world. There is a different type of sensitivity that is highlighted when a woman looks — really looks. And Janet Sternburg likes to look. Over the decades she has used her camera to document these moments and found unique ways of capturing the world around her. She has always been enamored with reflections and you can see this throughout her work. As a powerful female in the arts she hasn’t taken this job lightly. she has authored nine books, helped create films and worked with the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and PEN Center USA. Please read on to learn more about this passionate woman and her latest creation Looking at Mexico / Mexico Looks Back — a photography book of Mexico that isn’t just a gringa’s way of looking at the country.

Where are you based?
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with a pied a terre in Los Angeles, where I lived for thirty-plus years before deciding to live permanently in Mexico. (Before Los Angeles, I lived in New York for many years, a time that formed me. I grew up in Boston. I left, on a bus with a suitcase in hand, to live in NYC.)

What inspired your love for photography?
I’ve always loved to look. So much so that I’ve thought of my desire to look as a sort of ‘lust’ of the eyes. Then again, I really can’t NOT see. I’m always stopping to look, and if I’m with someone, to say, “Look, look!” Which can be irritating. But I can’t help it. With photography I discovered a way to take that love and, in effect, organize it so that the world I see has visual coherence and also meaning for myself and others.

What is your go-to camera?
iPhone 15 now. See below for earlier.

How has your photography evolved over the years?
At first, I used a disposable camera because that was all that was available at the moment. Yes, disposable. Single use. Throwaway. And I found my own way of working with that camera, using reflection, which gave me a way to portray an interpenetrating world. However, it became more and more difficult to get the film developed. When the iPhone came out it was my answer, as I went on using progressively newer editions through the years. With these low-tech instruments, I get what I want, — my ‘voice’ as an artist — which is a multi-dimensional and poetic rendering of the world.

Further, I now no longer work exclusively with reflection. It’s much more interesting to feel the world is open – and when I take pictures, whether ‘straight-ahead’ or using reflection, the images tend to be recognizable as my work.

What are your thoughts on how the photography world has evolved over the years?
It has evolved toward digital manipulation. Sometimes that can be wonderful. However, I have not chosen to go that route.

You are also a passionate writer, working on eight books and multiple films. What do you love to write the most?
Note: I’ve published nine books: five (5) literary books (memoir, essay, poetry and four (4) books of photography with text. I did make films, but no longer.

By and large, I don’t love to write. I’m a perfectionist. Writing is years of struggle. Two of my books took ten years. Sometimes the struggle is wildly interesting. At other times it can feel like a losing battle. But when I get there – when I’m satisfied — it’s pure joy.

What inspired your new book Looking at Mexico / Mexico Looks Back? Can you tell us about the book?
I’m going to quote excerpts from my introduction to the book because I answer this question there in the best way that I know. Here is the first sentence in that introduction:

“How, I ask myself, can I make a book of photographs that isn’t only a gringa’s way of looking at Mexico?”

And, a few pages later, I answer that question:
“Recently, at the end of 2022, I moved to Mexico permanently, to that same town that had first inspired me so many years before. I took a number of the photos in this book near to where I live, a barrio that retains its Mexican neighborliness. . . . Throughout an intense year, I took more photographs, although I don’t take all that many, aiming for a simplicity that I want to look easy, but isn’t. Back in my studio, I deleted ones that hinted at any sort of cliched view of Mexico, . . . looking for a particular quality that’s essential to me . . . photographs that suggest more than they depict, that imply layers and metaphors, and that refuse to be reduced to only one meaning. Eventually, I realized I had a sizable group of images that I could fully stand by, enough to make a book.

At this point I stopped and asked that question . . . how do I make a book that isn’t only a gringa’s way of looking at ‘my’ Mexico, more aware now that I’m living here of the assumptions of ownership that foreigners can bring to their adopted places?

I got lucky.

I met Jose Alberto Romero Romano, a physical therapist originally from Puebla, both of us living now in San Miguel de Allende, recommended by friends to treat my ailing back. . . . We talked about bad backs and about our lives, our ideas, and then about my photographs on the wall of my studio. I discovered Alberto’s acute sensitivity to visual images. He commented on what each photograph meant to him, the memories they evoked, his insights about Mexico. . . . As our mutual sparking of minds continued, I asked Alberto whether he would collaborate with me on this book, working together on the commentaries that accompany images. He agreed. Looking at Mexico/ Mexico Looks Back is a title that popped into my mind to communicate that, in addition to photographs, this book is a story of reciprocity, two people, each from different backgrounds, different countries, each with different histories and memories, looking for and finding a meeting place through photography.

What was it about Mexico that inspired this book?
Visual beauty everywhere that strikes and inspires me day after day. Also, profound cultural traditions that sustain people in Mexico. Also discovering ways of being that are different from my own, ones that I find compelling, exemplified by the annual Day of the Dead and its acceptance of death as part of life, not something to be feared. While this answer may sound abstract, you can find it in photographs and commentary throughout the book.

How was your experience shooting in Mexico? Were there any special moments along the way?
Not so much special moments that I can remember, at least today. They’ve all been special. But here’s something that I’ve learned: to ask permission when I take a photograph of a person. There’s a deep courtesy in Mexico that I want to make part of my own practice. That said, most of my photographs are not of people. I’ve written an essay in which I call myself a ‘car stalker’ . . . meaning that my eye is attracted to abandoned cars, and I often circle around them, looking for the angle for a photograph. I forget that I sometimes appear as though I have other, nefarious intentions, and will have to clarify, “No, yo soy una fotografa.”

Are photographers by implication thieves, not of property but of an essence? Perhaps so, but I think we return what is ‘taken,’ by images that inspire. You can decide that for yourselves.

Do you have a favorite photograph from Mexico? Why is it special to you?
STREAM: A very early image that showed me my way forward. Below is an excerpt from the catalog for my solo show LIMBUS at the USC Fisher Museum of Art.

I enjoy decoding an occasional image, feeling a bit like a magician whisking away a curtain. For example, with Stream, I am standing on a sidewalk in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I am looking into a window of an art gallery that displays a small painting of a mesa and a stream. Parked on the near side of the street behind me is a Volkswagen bus; on the opposite side of the street, a yellow scalloped wall encloses a nunnery. Further yet, behind that wall is a stand of trees.

But look now – that navigable space has collapsed into interpenetrating layers, the window becoming both a reflective surface and a screen on which my perception and the world meet in fertile confusion.

What is your creative process in creating a book?
Let's say it’s a book of photographs. For a long while, I pour through images, looking for ones I think are worthy to be kept. I put these into separate thematic files in Photo, and also save them by year. Ones I especially like I’ll print out on my inkjet printer, which isn’t very good but is good enough to give me a cheap eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch print that I’ll push-pin to the wall of my studio, or sometimes just leave out on my big worktable. I’ll wait, doing other things and making more piles. I’ll go back and back, to the wall, to the table, and make note of what catches my eye enough times for me to know there’s something interesting there . . . some spark that tells me how my mind and eye have been working. From there, I build a book, gathering images into groups, adding, deleting, letting the idea expand into possible texts, my own or others, looking for the “story” I’m telling with these images.

How is this book different from some of your other books?
Each and every book is something new — it has to be, otherwise one would be a hack. See my answer to the question below, again from my introduction that elaborates on this, the key being that this is the first time I’ve collaborated to make a book.

How does Jose Alberto Romero Romano, a Mexican physical therapist, play a role in this project?
Excerpted from introduction:
As our mutual sparking of minds continued, I asked Alberto whether he would collaborate with me on this book, working together on the commentaries that accompany images. He agreed. Looking at Mexico / Mexico Looks Back is a title that popped into my mind to communicate that, in addition to photographs, this book is a story of reciprocity, two people, each from different backgrounds, different countries, each with different histories and memories, looking for and finding a meeting place through photography.

This is how we have worked together these past months. Alberto would come to my home after a session with a patient. He had about an hour each day over the course of a month for us to look at individual photographs and talk, mostly in English, his second language.

I typed his words into my computer, trying to get them right, to get their flavor, asking about occasional words in Spanish that I didn’t understand. We drank coffee, ate a kind of pastry that we both liked, round with almond cream at the center. Sometimes he and I saw the same thing very differently, as when I showed him a photograph I’d taken through the window of a neighborhood tienda, an all-purpose store where I’d spotted bright oval objects hanging from a rope. I had no idea what they were. When I looked afterward at my photograph, I associated them with the three-dimensional roundness of Cézanne’s apples. Alberto immediately recognized them as the rough pads used by his grandmother to scrub him when he was a child, pads softened over time. Always I was surprised and elated by his poetic perceptions, his turns of expression and human depth.

We love how active you are with philanthropy. Can you tell us a little bit about being on the Board of Directors (4 of them as Vice President) of PEN Center USA?
My most extensive philanthropy was my thirty years as a partner to my husband when he was President of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). During these decades, while actively pursuing my own work as a writer and photographer, I advised him behind the scenes on most matters related to the college. Publically, I helped him to fundraise with the Los Angeles Giving Community and attended programs, events, and conferences throughout the world as his partner.

As for PEN, it’s a wonderful organization. Now PEN USA West has been folded into PEN America. During the years I was active, I gathered a committee to decide upon membership to the organization, widening the criteria to include more writers at different levels in their work; expanded membership beyond the Southern California area, and marveled at all the superb work being done by writers who may have been lesser-known but who stayed with their work against many odds. One year I chaired the Literary Awards.

Can you tell us about your time working as the Director of Writers in Performance for the Manhattan Theatre Club?
For ten years I pioneered in creating events of literature on stage. Among these events: an evening in which I adapted the writings of Colette, featuring Stockard Channing as Colette: a celebration of the anthology Ordinary Women (Communes Mujeres); an evening, Estadio Chile, commemorating the coup against Allende with readings by Allen Ginsberg, et al.

You are also speaking at the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House in April, for the second time. What can we expect from this speech? You will see a selection of images I’ve chosen, and projected for this event, and hear my thoughts about them, as well as a conversation between myself and fellow photographer Lorenz Kienzle. She was born in Munich and studied photography in Rome and Berlin. She is a long-time collaborator with US sculptor Richard Serra, currently a fellow at the Villa Aurora, an artist residence perched above the Pacific in a remarkably beautiful setting.

Women in the arts often get more and more dismissed as they age. What are your thoughts on this issue? And what advice do you have for any women struggling with this?
Women struggle. Women prevail. That’s what one has to do, certainly as a woman who is an artist. Our prevailing powers are great. I have published books on this subject, most especially The Writer on Her Work: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/636312

What is your motto in life?
Always lean a little bit away from the direction in which you naturally incline.

To learn more about Janet Sternburg please check out the links below:
Photography: www.janetsternburgphoto.com
Literary Books: www.janetsternburg.com
Instagram: janetsternburg
Wikipedia: Janet_Sternburg

Reflections with Janet Sternburg