Robert Sturman

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Yoga is so incredibly beautiful, it has been close to effortless for me to use it as the language to tell a story of the world we live in right now. A beautiful story of human beings all over the world, collectively in pursuit of being better at being human. If you look at the poses, they more often than not show the figure reaching towards the sky, longing to touch something beyond the ordinary. Hands are often in prayer and on the heart, eyes relaxed and looking within, heart opening to the clouds. Nothing that I have seen in the entire history of art has ever expressed so much beauty. We are immersed in it right now and that is the story I seek to tell.  

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I realized that I could photograph the entire world using the language of yoga to tell our story. A remarkable story of humanity in pursuit of living a better life. My work has given me the opportunity to make art with yogis in Kenya, Mexico, Italy, Thailand, Palestine, Israel, Cuba, to name but a few. Yoga has a way of crossing cultural boundaries and continental divides. Everybody's doin' it! And everybody's connected!

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Yoga makes everything more beautiful. When we practice, it washes away the unnecessary. Not only does it feel beautiful to practice, it inspires us see the beauty more clearly. And furthermore, this gorgeous figurative poetry looks exquisite in works of art. A human being complimenting the world with the figurative poetry of yoga in the composition brings so much beauty. I cannot say it enough, yoga makes everything more beautiful. 

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I can be a broken record. Simply put, as Rumi so eloquently stated, "I can't stop point towards the beauty."

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There's just something so profound, timeless and soulful about the black and white photograph. When I was in High School, that is all we did. We photographed with black and white film and spent hours in the darkroom printing the images. My foundation is in black and white, with a long list of heroes in the history of photography — ranging from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Ansel Adans, Edward Weston, W. Eugene Smile, Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, Robert Frank, Jerry Uelsmann, Cindy Sherman, Diane Arbus, Minor White, William Giles, and many more. 

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Everything I know about the essence of photography, I learned from working in prisons.  We live in a photo obsessed world and each time we have these cameras in our hands, it is an opportunity to pay attention, to see others, and for others to be seen and feel seen. This is such a healing gesture in this life. I realized the first time I went into a prison that no one cared about the pictures, where they were going, how they looked, being tagged, etc... The gift was in the moment of acknowledging other human beings as worthy of being seen. They light up. The camera is just an excuse. 

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I am confident that photographs are one of the greatest influencers on our planet. They truly have the potential to evolve humanity in a more positive direction and change the world. When I realized this, there was no turning back. My work with the United States Military is greatly done in an effort to focus on something remarkable that is happening. Soldiers and veterans are falling in love with meditation and yoga. And they are finding healing after seeing things that people should not have to see. The veteran suicide rate is astronomical and I have met so many veterans who have told me that yoga literally saved their lives. This inspired me to use my camera to tell their stories and create images that the world could see and get used to so that it would eventually become reality that yoga is going on in the military. I believe that we can get to a place where it is simply obvious that people in the military are practicing yoga and meditation. Of course they are. 

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Please Note:  The images in this portfolio are not for sale. 

I learned about Africa Yoga Project one day while on the internet and I was immediately intrigued. I had seen a few photographs and I felt a calling to go there and just make art. I sent a note to them and introduced myself and told them I would like to help tell their story. Two months later, I was on a plane to Nairobi with the intention to create a beautifully, moving series that could show the world the good that they were doing. Two weeks after returning home, I was contacted by The New York Times requesting to do a photographic essay on the images that I captured in Africa. It was an incredible moment, as it further exemplified the power of the photograph to communicate ideas which have the potential to change the world. 

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Yoga and meditation saves the lives of people who devote their lives to saving lives. I focus on creating works of art of these individuals because I want to celebrate them and because I know that by showing them as yogis, it gives them permission to be yogis. They see a lot of painful things and the practice helps them to process it and find healing.

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I never know what is going to come my way. I started aligning myself with breast cancer survivors a few years ago when Yulady Saluti and I met up in Woodstock, New York to create a series of images. All I knew is that I cared. And so we created a series of images and the work went out into the world and I realized that it had a mission — to allow my subjects to be seen and have the opportunity to reclaim their dignity. To see themselves as beautiful. To see scars as beautiful. And to give the rest of us permission to see the beauty in our scars and let go of the shame. 

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Please Note: The images in this portfolio are not for sale.

My work has always been about celebrating all of humanity in pursuit of living our greatest potential. As an artist, I was using the language of yoga asana to tell this story. To go from photographing yoga to photographing this movement feels very natural to me — human beings demonstrating on the streets with their arms up in power, reaching. Yoga philosophy teaches us that we are all the same; yet reality is not a reflection of that. And now we are fighting for it.

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The style that looks painterly is actually a Polaroid technique and no digital alterations have been added. Here's how: In finding his own artistic signature, Sturman developed and refined an improvisational, labor-intensive process that synthesizes both his photographic and painterly expertise. Each of his pieces begins with an original image created with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, instant photographic film, and meticulously considered lighting. As soon as the image comes out of the camera, Sturman warms it up to keep the chemical emulsions fluid—depending on his locale when shooting, source heat might be the sun in the tropics, or the warmth of his winter coat in cooler climes. On site wherever he is in the world, Sturman then immediately carves into the still wet and supple surface of the photo with a variety of handmade tools until he feels the image has been manipulated and transformed to its ultimate potential. The piece is later enlarged using an optimally high-resolution scanner, and a process through which none of the original light radiance or color luminosity is lost. Because Sturman chooses his subject matter in advance with its inherent color values in mind, his palette is extraordinary. Coupled with the impressionistic "brushstrokes" of Sturman's hand implements, the result is as pure a fusion of painting and photography as exists anywhere. In 2010, with the closing of Polaroid, Sturman made the shift to digital photography.

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