Janet Sternburg, the accomplished poet, producer, memoirist, and photographer, recently moved permanently to Mexico after 25 years of intermittent visits and stays.

Sternburg’s artistic practice as a photographer began by taking images from disposable film cameras, and over time migrated to digital – but the tenets of her work have been remarkably consistent: She wanders and waits until something catches her eye, often a juxtaposition of items, or a multiplicity of images caught in a window’s reflection, and then seizing le moment juste, the shutter clicks. There is no manipulation of the images afterward. What Sternburg sees is what we get.

In the town in Mexico where Sternburg settled, she continued to take images, print them out, and then pin them to a pasteboard wall in her home. But these images posed a dilemma to Sternburg: She was not a tourist, but neither was she indigenous to the region and the culture. She didn’t want her work to presume ownership or presume an intervention in a culture that was not hers to share.

Providentially, a novel approach suggested itself. Sternburg was receiving physical therapy for a bad back. Her therapist, Jose Alberto Romero Romano, a former dancer born in Puebla, was steeped in Mexico’s history, traditions, folklore, and superstitions. When he looked at the photos in Sternburg’s home, it sparked associations regarding his own personal history and lived experience of the Mexican temperament and culture.

Sternburg and Romero Romano began a dialogue about her work that resulted in her latest book, Looking at Mexico, Mexico Looks Back, (published by Distanz Verlag) which features Sternburg’s photos and occasional text by Romero Romano (in English and Spanish) as to what the images evoked in him. It was as if Sternburg’s images were a Tarot deck, each photo a card whose meaning Romero Romano interpreted.

Sometimes, Romero Romano’s observations take on an almost spiritual quality; other times they are merely descriptive. Sternburg’s photos are themselves poetic and mysterious and sometimes, like throwing the I Ching, the combination of image and Romero Romano’s English and Spanish text, yields a deeper meaning.

That magical sense of discovery is at the heart of Looking at Mexico Mexico Looks Back and it is Sternburg’s own generous heart that is the catalyst for this collaboration of images and texts calling us from Mexico.