Joni Sternbach

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to present Surfboard, an exhibition of photographs by Joni Sternbach featuring twenty 14×11-inch gelatin silver contact prints made from glass-plate collodion negatives. Devoted to the surfboard as both a sculptural object and a vessel of personal history, the exhibition will be on view from June 27 through August 29, 2026.

Using the 19th-century photographic process, Sternbach portrays surfboards as singular artifacts shaped by craftsmanship, use, history, and the ocean itself. Her images bridge centuries of photographic tradition and the enduring culture of surfing, creating works that feel both timeless and distinctly contemporary.

Known internationally for her use of the 19th-century tintype process to create compelling portraits of surfers, Sternbach applies similar working methods to the surfboard itself. The artist writes:

"I document historic surfboards by making large-format, collodion-coated glass negatives. I use this process conceptually and as a tool to uncover the essence of my subject and to visualize its archaic form. The collodion process allows the elements of each board to be reduced in a purposeful transformation, as the chemistry itself has unique color sensitivities and insensitivities, rendering certain colors more prominent and others invisible. This quality of the process is essential to the work itself, as it allows us to see details that lie just below the surface and are not perceptible to the human eye. Finally, I connect the elements by laying the glass plate on silver gelatin paper to make contact prints, repeating the gesture of rider to board."

The resulting photographs combine the tactile immediacy of historical photographic methods with the enduring iconography of surf culture. Removed from the ocean and presented as singular subjects, the boards become portraits in their own right—records of human touch, craftsmanship, and lived experience. Sternbach's use of the wet plate collodion process introduces a distinctive visual language marked by luminous detail, rich tonalities, and the subtle imperfections inherent to handmade photographic materials.

Her surfboard portraits constitute a typology: sculptural totems, elegiac forms—weathered, idiosyncratic, each deeply individual. Their scratches, repairs, waxy residue, and hand-shaped contours reveal decades of use and devotion. The boards embody the lineage of surfing culture while evoking broader histories of craft, memory, and American vernacular design.

For more than two decades, Joni Sternbach has explored the intersections of landscape, identity, and photographic history. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; the New Orleans Museum of Art; and the Brooklyn Museum. She is also the author of several monographs, including Surfland (2009), Surf Site Tin Type (2015), and Surfboard (2020), which was named one of the ten best photography books of 2020 by Smithsonian Magazine.