CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/2/2018

Joni Sternbach's 'Surf Site Tin Type' evokes a time when the sea had its own voice and the energy of mana animated all persons and places

"Olivia" is reproduced from Surf Site Tin Type, Joni Sternbach's book of tintype portraits of contemporary surfers using the nineteenth-century wet-plate collodion process. "The power of these pictures is after all romantic," noted photography curator and critic Lyle Rexer writes. "Duke Kahanamoku—the native Hawaiian waterman and Olympic swimming champion most responsible for heralding the sport outside Hawaii—preferred to make his own surfboards out of wood, joining land and water in a mystical material union. Similarly, Sternbach's tintypes bind the subjects to their environments through an intensely physical means of representation. The plates register atmospheric conditions, temperatures, sunlight; not just the visual evidence of individuals, conventional photography's sterile narrative of two dimensions in the real world. And if the tintypes evoke a past time, it is perhaps a time long before photography, when the sea had its own voice and the energy of mana animated all persons and places."