I've Been Walking

by Janet Sternburg (Artist)

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.

With a conversation between Janet Sternburg and philosopher Jane Bennett (Vibrant Matter).

144 pages, Hardcover

Published September 21, 2021

About the author

Janet Sternburg is a writer of memoir, essays, poetry and plays, as well as a fine-art photographer. Her books include two memoirs, White Matter: A Memoir of Family and Medicine (Hawthorne Books) and Phantom Limb: A Meditation on Memory (University of Nebraska Press and Foreverland Press), as well as the classic two volumes of The Writer on Her Work (W.W. Norton) described by Poets & Writers as "groundbreaking...a landmark," and Optic Nerve: Photopoems (Red Hen Press).

White Matter (September, 2015) has been selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the "BIG INDIE BOOKS OF FALL."

Her work in theatre and film has included directing and producing films, among them the award-winning "Virginia Woolf: The Moment Whole" and "El Teatro Campesino," both broadcast on public television; serving as Director of Writers in Performance at the Manhattan Theatre Club; curating two 13-part cable television series of independent films; and writing the play "The Fifth String," performed in workshop in Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York,scheduled for a full production in 2017 at New York's La Mama Theater.

In 1998, she picked up a camera and began another life as a photographer. Her work has now been shown at museums and galleries around the world, with solo shows in Berlin, Munich, New York, Los Angeles, Mexico, and Korea, where she was commissioned by The Seoul Institute of the Arts to create a full-building installation. Portfolios of her work have been published in Aperture and Art Journal. In 2016, Distanz Verlag (Berlin) will publish Overspilling World, a book of her photographs.

She lives in Los Angeles and is married to Steven D. Lavine, President of the California Institute of the Arts, traveling
worldwide with him on behalf of the Institute and serving as partner on many of its ventures. Part of each year she lives in
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Her honors include fellowships and residencies, among them from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Embassy in Berlin, The MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Programs. She was selected by The Utne Reader as one of 40 creative people in the United States and Europe described as "innovative. . . with depth, resonance. . . full of ideas and insights that challenge us to live more fully."

Excerpts of her writing and photography can be found at janetsternburg.com

Author Photo: James Jansen