LaGuardia professor heads to Antarctica

Scott Sternbach has been a photographer for as long as he can remember. When he was 11, his grandfather taught him how to develop his own pictures, and he realized that he wanted to devote his life to the craft.
Now, the Director of the photography program at LaGuardia Community College, the National Science Foundation (NSF) honored him with a grant to travel to Antarctica for seven weeks to document the fieldwork of biologists, sea captains, divers, and astronomers at the Palmer Station.
“By looking at the individual characteristics of the people who occupy Antarctica, the viewer can then begin to understand the place since people are a reflection of what they do and where they exist,” Sternbach said. “When you spend time in a place like that, you fall in love with it.”
Seeking to raise awareness about global warming, Sternbach will accompany a team of researchers and their staff. Urban residents will make up the target audience for the forthcoming collection of life-size portraits, which will be exhibited throughout the tri-state area.
“I hope this experience will raise the level of awareness of this broad swath of our diverse populous and inspire people to become involved and active in the global work to save not only Antarctica but the world’s ecosystem as well,” said Sternbach, who has photographed people in rural America, Alaska, Costa Rica and Africa.
In New York, Sternbach photographed pre-war industrial ruins to express “the beauty of deteriorating buildings and the horror of what was done at that time to our environment,” he said. “I try to affect people with my vision of the beauty of nature and the detriment of pollution.”
Accentuating this beauty is the restored 100-year-old camera Sternbach uses to produce the images.
“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,” he said, adding that his subjects act naturally because they forget the photographer’s presence in the time it takes for him to set up the camera.
Though he has traveled all over the world, much of Sternbach’s work, which viewers can peruse at www.scottsternbach.com is concerned with New Jersey and New York. He encourages his students at LaGuardia to explore local communities.
“Even right here in Queens…It’s a hotbed of things to photograph and talk about,” he said. “You have to be really passionate about something, and then you have to work it.”
His favorite quote to share with students is by the famous photojournalist Dorothea Lange:
“Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion…The subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.”