Surfers, and the sands of time

May 22, 2009|Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

SALEM - Joni Sternbach has perfected a form of time travel. To get from present to past she uses nothing more complicated than surfboards and tintypes. Surfboards you know about. Tintypes? They were a popular 19th-century photographic process that printed an image on metal, most often iron or steel (Sternbach uses aluminum). Cheaper than daguerreotypes, they were like that format in making images that were unique rather than reproducible.

Sternbach photographs surfers posing with their boards and prints the results as tintypes. In fact, she takes a portable darkroom to the beach and develops her images right there. Forty-seven examples, along with two dozen vintage tintypes, a display explaining that process, and a cheerfully battered surfboard make up "SurfLand: Photographs by Joni Sternbach," which runs at the Peabody Essex Museum through Oct. 4. There's also a monitor playing a video of surfers that Sternbach made with Bruce Milne (the sound of the surf is very soothing).

The time travel comes through the cognitive dissonance of seeing a technique that visually declares its ostensible pastness (you can't look at a tintype and not automatically think "long, long time ago") being used to record something so contemporary as fiberglass boards, latex wet suits, and skimpy bikinis.

The effect of this deadpan displacement of the time-space continuum is at once disorienting and pleasing. The disorientation is obvious. Imagine, as a counterexample, how disconcerting it would be to see Victorians staring out from the viewfinder of a digital camera.

The pleasure, which is more subtle, takes multiple forms. Thanks to their subject matter, these images have an innate elegance. The sleekness of the surfers' physiques echoes the even greater sleekness of their boards. Then there is the overall effect of Sternbach's pictures, which is one of crisp dreaminess. She offers both the particularity of a dream and its otherworldliness. We don't get the glossy endless summer of Beach Boys songs. Rather, the black-and-white images conjure up a matte world of mist and fog.

Adding to the slightly unreal effect is the narrow focus of these images; the ocean in the background almost seems more like a backdrop. The names of the sites where Sternbach photographs have a quasi-fantastic quality, too: Montauk, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Del Mar. They indicate not so much actual locations as states of littoral grace.