Bøger af Janet Sternburg

Mexiko: Ein Porträt Die Schriftstellerin, Fotografin und Philosophin Janet Sternburg (geb. 1943 in Boston; lebt und arbeitet in Los Angeles und San Miguel de Allende) blickt zurück auf das Land, in dem ihre fotografische Leidenschaft ihren Anfang nahm; vor 23 Jahren machte sie ihre ersten Fotos in Mexiko. In ihrer neuen Fotoserie betrachtet Sternburg Mexiko mithilfe von Low-Tech-Kameras und erzeugt ein poetisches Bild der facettenreichen Kultur des Landes. Im Jahr 2022 lernte Sternburg den mexikanischen Physiotherapeuten Jose Alberto Romero Romano kennen. Ihrer Einladung folgend erzählen beide im Buch ihre Geschichten über die mexikanische Kultur. Neben einem tiefgreifenden kulturellen Austausch erzählt dieses Buch auch die Geschichte zweier Menschen mit unterschiedlichen Hintergründen und Erinnerungen, die durch die Fotografie einen Ort der Begegnung finden. Looking at Mexico / Mexico Looks Back ist Sternburgs dritte Monografie.   Mexico: A Portrait The writer, photographer, and philosopher Janet Sternburg (b. Boston, 1943; lives and works in Los Angeles and San Miguel de Allende) looks back at the land that spawned her love for photography; twenty-three years ago, she took her first photos in Mexico. In her new photo series, Sternburg looks at Mexico using low-tech cameras to create a poetic image of the country's multifaceted culture. In 2022, Sternburg met Jose Alberto Romero Romano, a Mexican physical therapist. Accepting her invitation, both tell their stories of Mexican culture in the book. In addition to a deep cultural exchange, this book tells a story of two people with different backgrounds and memories seeking and finding a place of encounter through photography. Looking at Mexico / Mexico Looks Back is Sternburg's third monograph.

White Matter: A Memoir of Family and Medicine is the story of a Bostonian close-knit Jewish working-class family of five sisters and one brother and the impact they and their next generation endured due to the popularization of lobotomy during the 20th century. When Janet Sternburg's grandfather abandoned his family, and her uncle, Bennie, became increasing mentally ill, Sternburg's mother and aunts had to bind together and make crucial decisions for the family's survival. Two of the toughest familial decisions they made were to have Bennie undergo a lobotomy to treat his schizophrenia and later to have youngest sister, Francie, undergo the same procedure to treat severe depression. Both heartrending decisions were largely a result of misinformation disseminated that popularized and legitimized lobotomy.Woven into Sternburg's story are notable figures that influenced the family as well as the entire medical field. In 1949, Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing the lobotomy, and in the three years that followed his acceptance of the award, more Americans underwent the surgery than during the previous 14 years. By the early 1950s, Walter Freeman developed an alternate technique for lobotomy, which he proselytized during his travels throughout the country in a van he dubbed the "Lobotomobile.”The phrase "prefrontal lobotomy” was common currency growing up in Janet Sternburg's family and in White Matter she details this scientific discovery that disconnects the brain's white matter, leaving a person without feelings, and its undeserved legitimization and impact on her family. She writes as a daughter consumed with questions about her mother and aunts-all well meaning women who decided their siblings' mental health issues would be best treated with lobotomies. By the late 1970s, the surgical practice was almost completely out of favor, but its effects left patients and their families with complicated legacies as well as a stain on American medical history. Every generation has to make its own medical choices based on knowledge that will inevitably come to seem inadequate in the future. How do we live with our choices when we see their consequences?

These are brave and intimate poems etched with breathtaking constraint in a calibrated free-fall through the separate terrains of explicit meaning, metaphor and photography with impeccable timing. description by Trisha Brown