Can a still photograph embody living perception? Can it contain its abundance? Can photography, not a time-based medium, render ongoing flow? Can it do justice to an overspilling world? To these questions, Janet Sternburg (b. Boston, 1943; lives and works in Los Angeles and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico), a writer and philosopher as well as a photographer, says yes. Her work proves that photography can render the perceptual movement that is our experience. Working without any optical or digital manipulation and with the simplest of means – disposable and early iPhone cameras – she brings together the manifest aspects of the world on a single plane, portraying a vision of interpenetrating and layered time and space. Often shooting through windows, she uses reflection not to mirror but rather to blur conventional separations between inside and outside, solid and fluid, subject and object. These are images of consciousness – its fluidity and porosity as opposed to the delimitations that structure reasoned thought – fused with everyday life.

Overspilling World is Janet Sternburg’s first monograph. With texts by Sternburg, art historian Pepe Karmel, photographer Catherine Opie, curator Alexandra von Stosch, and filmmaker-photographer Wim Wenders.