Robert von Sternberg is a distinguished career artist, photographer, university art educator, and philanthropist. Approximately 1,418 examples of his photography have been acquired for permanent art collections by 221 national and international public institutions in 46 states, Washington, DC, Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. His photographs have been included in more than 288 museum, university, or private art gallery exhibitions and his photographic work has been reviewed and/or reproduced in 65 publications.
He has served as a guest curator for 17 art exhibitions and is the founding director of a philanthropic association of 22 internationally recognized senior photographers offering donations of vintage and contemporary photographic art to selected institutional art collections from a program known as The Museum Project.
From the earliest efforts to irrigate the desert, to the postwar population explosion, to present-day suburban sprawl and conservation efforts, human enterprise has shaped the land-scape of Los Angeles. It is perhaps appropriate that Robert von Sternberg, who has lived and worked most his life in Los Angeles County, identifies human incursions into the natural world as a recurring theme at the heart of his photographic practice.
Avid travelers, von Sternberg and his wife Patricia are especially fond of road trips, where the photographer delights in the offbeat side of the American touristic tradition. Far from focusing on the most canonical or scenic tourist destinations, the artist seizes on the visual possibilities of overlooked roadside attractions and chance conjunctions. The surreal artificial lighting that illuminates the American nighttime often provides the “definitive photographic images” that von Sternberg seeks in his travels: an incandescent gas station, the lurid red glow from a paper lantern, a grid of ceiling lights that mimic distant stars. Camera-toting fellow tourists also become subjects as they seek their own “definitive images”—which sometimes also include the photographer himself.
More often, though, von Sternberg captures scenes in which human figures are distant or absent. In this, his “decisive moments” are very unlike the densely populated ones pictured by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Still, von Sternberg’s roadside moments are crowded despite their ostensible vacancy. Through the roads, fences, signage, buildings, and all the other material structures of civilization, humanity marks the land; even in our bodily absence, we make our presence insistently known.
On Robert von Sternberg’s Photography
Caitlin Silberman
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California
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