June 3rd, 2008 | LaGuardia Community College
Scott Sternbach, the director of LaGuardia Community College’s photography department, has received a prestigious National Science Foundation grant to take his 100 year-old 8×10 view camera and travel to Antarctica to create of series of portraits of the scientists and crew members who are doing environmental research at a remote research station.
Mr. Sternbach, an accomplished portrait photographer, will journey this fall to the Palmer Research Station, located on the peninsula that juts out near the southern tip of South America, where he will photograph the “souls” of Antarctica, the 30-some-odd researchers, biologists, cooks, pilots and boat captains who are involved in a federal project to study the effects of global warming on the region.
Using Antarctica’s magnificent and pristine landscape as the backdrop, Mr. Sternbach will document his subjects’ daily adventures. Even before stepping onto the polar ice, he said that he can envision himself photographing a researcher surrounded by scores of penguins, a diver emerging from the ice as it freezes around him and a boat captain out on the deck of an icebreaker in the middle of the Antarctic Sea.
He ultimately hopes to create a typology of the people who work in Antarctica. “By looking at the individual characteristics of the people who occupy Antarctica,” he said, “the viewer can then begin to understand the place since people are a reflection of what they do and where they exist.”
The photographer will be viewing his subjects through the lens of his restored vintage camera that produces large, richly detailed black and white images. “The 8×10 camera can provide a fresh exploration into the subject,” Mr. Sternbach said. “It provides exquisite detail in pure black and white allowing the viewer to examine and enter into the scene, or in some cases, the lives of those being photographed. It tends to distill the subject and reveal the poetry of the place in a different way than when viewed in color.”
Although it will be no walk in the park lugging around his cumbersome 12-pound field camera as he follows his subjects, Mr. Sternbach believes that no other camera captures the essence of the subject like large format. Part of the reason has to do with the slow and deliberate process he goes through—setting up and positioning the camera and tripod—and the relationship he establishes with the subject while going through the steps. “During this period I am talking to the subject and by the time I am ready to take the picture they have forgotten the camera and they are somewhere else in their mind so you get a very natural photo,” he said.
For the past six years, Mr. Sternbach has carried his beautiful view camera to remote areas to capture people and their environs. He has hiked to the backwoods of Delaware County to capture the endangered culture and lifestyle of the small dairy farmer. He has documented the eerily desolate sites of pre-war industrial ruins in and around New York City. And he has explored Jersey City’s poor neighborhood shops, churches and streets.
“Forging new ground in fragile, yet hostile environments, whether within the inner city, beyond the back roads of upstate New York or among the ruins of old industry’s remnants is what drives me on this quest to photograph in Antarctica,” he said.
Mr. Sternbach said he was inspired to take on the challenge of photographing the people of Antarctica with a view camera by Frank Hurley, an Australian photographer who accompanied Ernest Shackleton, an Antarctic explorer, on his 1914 expedition to the region.
Funding his project is NSF’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, which gives awardees the opportunity to create serious works of art that exemplify the Antarctic heritage of humankind. Through these works, the program seeks to increase public understanding of the Antarctic region, as well as the associated research and educational endeavors.
Mr. Sternbach plans on increasing public understanding through various activities. When he returns, he will present his collection of life-size photographs at LaGuardia, as well as at high schools and colleges in the tri-state area. He would also like to display the prints at a large format print exhibition, on a website gallery and in a published book.
“The heroes of this effort to help save the Earth need to be seen by students and those who visit the galleries and museums in New York and beyond,” he said.
He said that he hopes his photographs will have a far-reaching impact on their audience. “I hope this experience will raise the level of awareness of this broad swath of our diverse populous,” he said, “and inspire people to become involved and active in the global work to save not only Antarctica but the world’s ecosystem as well.”