We were lucky to catch up with Janet Sternburg recently and have shared our conversation below.

Janet , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

I’m not a company. I’m an artist of words and images. My mission is to move people. To inspire them. There are stories behind the development of this mission.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’ve been a writer since age six when I asked my mother for a pen because I had just seen a movie that inspired me and I wanted to express my feelings.
I’ve been a photographer since 1998, when in mid-life I picked up a disposable camera in Mexico and came up with a new way of seeing the world.
I’ve published nine books, five of them purely literary, four of them photography, often with text.
The first five include the two volumes of The Writer on Her Work, about what it means to be a contemporary woman who writes. Still in print since 1980, the book has been called groundbreaking. As Julia Alvarez wrote in the preface to the 20th anniversary edition (WW Norton), “It was a first, women laying claim to a room of their own in the mansion of literature.”
Filmmaker Wim Wenders in his Foreword to my monograph, Overspilling World: The Photographs of Janet Sternburg, “Her work makes you understand the act of seeing in a new way.”
I think this is what sets me apart — I do things that are first, that no one else has done; I don’t set out to do that, but it has happened so many times that I know this is who I am, someone who hopes to make people see and understand the world in a fresh way.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In 2018 I had the first solo museum show of my photographic work. Two weeks after it opened, I fell, breaking my sacrum and two places straight through in my pelvis. I wasn’t able to move forward on the many opportunities that a show of this stature would have given me. It took a while to recover. I felt I’d disappeared from view. Then I realized that I was doing that to myself.
I gave myself tough assignments: for example, read a long and complex book, and then review it, I did that to my satisfaction (the book was Figuring by Maria Popova; the review was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books). I felt sad that I couldn’t walk in the world with a camera, but I said to myself that I need to look through past work and see what themes emerged. That became a special limited edition book, City of Shrines, a way of seeing sites in Los Angeles not as literal shrines but embody shrine-like qualities so that one could see the ordinary anew. I also wrote texts for that book. So one part of resilience was to make myself return to my world. The other part was to come to the realization that my world wouldn’t go away. That it was who I was, as a creator in sickness and health, and that it was there for me always.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

I’m going to answer that from my own perspective as someone who doesn’t run a business and doesn’t have a
“brand.” Nonetheless I do have to publicize my books and sell my photographs. Because I am 81 years old, I am no longer doing those things as energetically as I did in the past. But what I do is try to keep in touch with many people, not to sell or publicize but to enjoy and maintain far-flung relationships, not mainly with readers or buyers, but with the world of creators and thinkers who are friends and colleagues. I trust that the creative back and forth will bring more people to what I do.

Contact Info:

• Website: Photography: www.janetsternburgphoto.com. Writing: www.janetsternburg.ccom
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janetsternburg/.
• Facebook: Am on Facebook

Image Credits

copyright Janet Sternburg