The New York times, March 17, 1997, pp. C11, C12:
25,000 Photos by One Artist: Glimpses Into Private World
"All around me I saw people who became cynical and
bitter when they didn't get the recognition they thought
they deserved, and I wanted to be free of that," he said.
"I wanted only to do my work, for myself, without any
commercial influences. For me there was simply never any
other way to do it."
By Paul Goldberger
New York -- Aaron Rose gets up around 5 o'clock every morning,
makes a cup of coffee and disappears into a small darkroom behind
the kitchen of his loft in Manhattan's SoHo district. There he remains
for hours, quietly mixing chemicals, creating negatives, and making
prints of photographic images he has shot himself. Then he emerges to,
as he puts it, "begin the business of dealing with people and all the
rest of life."
Rose, a soft-spoken man who is either 58 or 59 -- an orphan, he says he
has never been quite sure when he was born -- has spent his mornings
that way for nearly 30 years, during which he has created one of the
most remarkable oeuvres of any photographer in modern times. He has
made more than 25,000 images and printed each one by hand only once,
so that each picture is a unique work of art.
As remarkable as his deeply sensual images, which range in subject from
New York City to landscapes to still lifes, is the fact that as soon as
each print is done he files it away, showing it only to a small circle
of friends and collectors. His work is known to people within the
photography world, who have tried over the years to persuade him to have
a gallery show or let a museum display his photographs. He has
continually refused, saying he is not motivated by commercial concerns
and wants to be free to pursue his muse as he sees fit.
Aaron Rose's isolation is now coming to an end, however. He has agreed
to allow five of his photographs to be shown in the Whitney Biennial,
which opens on Thursday, marking what is, in effect, his debut. He is
far and away the oldest artist in this year's biennial whose work has
never been shown in a museum or a New York commercial gallery. But
unlike most artists new to the museum and gallery scene, he has not
been striving to break open its doors. Instead, he has defiantly turned
his back on the notion of even trying to earn a living from his art,
preferring -- rather like Wallace Stevens or Charles Ives -- to find
another mechanism of putting bread on the table.
In Rose's case, that mechanism has not been the insurance industry,
where both Stevens and Ives became rich, but the more modest route of
being a minor SoHo landlord. In 1969, looking for a way out of his
increasingly frustrating career as a commercial photographer, Rose sold
a collection of antique hand tools he had acquired over several years to
the Eli Lilly Co. for $250,000 and used $156,000 of his windfall to buy
the loft building on West Broadway where he still lives. He manages the
building himself, and the rental income from the upper floors and the
ground-floor retail space frees him to spend most of his time pursuing
his photography.
"The one thing that I knew early on in my life was that I never wanted
to become a disenchanted artist," he said the other day, sitting at an
old wooden table in his sparsely furnished loft. He speaks with a gentle
enthusiasm that manages to convey both an earnestness to explain
himself and an eagerness to get back into his darkroom.
"All around me I saw people who became cynical and bitter when they
didn't get the recognition they thought they deserved, and I wanted to be
free of that," he said. "I wanted only to do my work, for myself, without
any commercial influences. For me there was simply never any other
way to do it."
In 1969, SoHo was still largely industrial, just beginning to fill up
with artists. "Did anyone know back then what was going to happen with
SoHo?" Rose asked. "I only knew that I had found a huge place with
beautiful light, and it was cheap enough to let me do what I cared about.
The neighborhood had only a few artists back then. I had a printing plant
on the floor below me and a factory above me, and every morning the
machines would start to go, and I never needed an alarm clock."
The explosion of SoHo, which eventually squeezed out many of the
other artists who pioneered the conversion of the neighborhood,
paradoxically made it easier for Rose to fulfill his dream: the more
valuable SoHo real estate became, the more it assured his freedom from
the marketplace of art. His building has mirrored the evolution of SoHo
from an industrial location to the home of art galleries to a retail
center. For years, his ground-floor tenant was the Holly Solomon Gallery,
and now it is Smith & Hawken.
What makes Rose different from most well-to-do artists who do not
need to sell their art to survive, however, is the immensity, and utter
single-mindedness, of his career.
Separated from his second wife for five years -- "She just couldn't
understand the way I was working, why I wasn't putting my work out
into the commercial world," he said -- he has done almost nothing for
three decades except take photographs and develop them himself. He
has created a body of work that in both size and quality rivals that of
the most eminent photographers active today, and he has done it so
quietly that almost no one outside a small circle of cognoscenti knows
of his existence.
He is so determined to control the process by which his photographs are
made that he not only mixes his own chemicals but also builds his own
cameras and makes his own lenses, and he designed and assembled his
own darkroom. In an age when photography is moving rapidly toward a
computer-driven, digital technology in which photographs are seen as
collections of data bits that can be replicated an infinite number of
times, he essentially takes and develops his pictures by hand.
While Rose has sold a handful of photographs to collectors and friends,
he does so reluctantly, since he does not make images in duplicate and
each sale means the deletion of a unique element from his precisely
catalogued archive. His images fill a silent storeroom on an upper floor
of his building, where shelves are lined with gray box after gray box,
kept in chronological order, each one filled with photographs perfectly
matted and labeled. There they sit, like Emily Dickinson's poems inside
her trunk in Amherst, a trove of art as yet unseen by the public.
His work is not easily characterized, although it is distinctively his own.
He thinks of it as a matter of "taking chemistry and light as far as I can,"
and he is far more interested in probing the nature of photography itself
than he is in documenting the world, or in the art of composition, which
for many photographers is the prime creative act in photography.
Rose composes his images with care and precision, but it is the way in
which they are printed, with soft, glowing light and subtle tones that are
not merely black and white but include shades of pink and orange and
gold, that makes them truly remarkable. He often combines negative and
positive images in a single print, making a photograph seem more
abstract.
"The process is quite phenomenal if you just allow it to go," he said. "I
get excited by the way the light strikes the silver or the gold. I think
of myself as partly an alchemist."
He has taken his pictures in several series. There is a huge set of images
of New York City rooftops, 10 years' worth of pictures that are
tantalizingly balanced between abstraction and representation; a series of
photographs of seashells that are voluptuous, soft, and sensual; a set of
photographs of the Milky Way that look bedazzling, far from the crisp
and didactic feeling of much photography of the night sky; a set of
images of underbrush, magnificently portrayed from a worm's-eye view
and rendered monumental; and a series of sweeping landscapes that,
conversely, are rendered intimate.
Rose's pictures combine elements of Man Ray and Paul Strand, to name
but two of the photographers his work calls to mind, and his images
invariably give the viewer the sense that he is seeing something as never
before -- that he is seeing the world not merely reinterpreted but as
profoundly rethought. For this is photography that caresses the world,
that looks at it with a deep and gentle curiosity, determined not merely
to show the viewer something but to break apart its secrets and make of
them art.
By doing his work in private, and keeping his pictures mostly away from
the world, Rose intended to keep his own focus entirely on his work and
to avoid having it affected by the demands of the rest of life. Curiously,
however, he now runs the risk of having his life seem as intriguing as his
art, which can be dangerous for an artist.
After all, who in this age of media excess could not be fascinated by the
tale of an artist who turned away from publicity and was determined to
pursue his art without any recognition, not because he could not get it
but because he did not want it? In a time when publicity is mother's milk
for many artists, when the art market operates on the assumption that if
a tree falls in the forest and a major dealer isn't there to hear it then
it could not have made a sound, Rose's determination to go his own way
exerts nearly as powerful an allure as his work itself.
Rose knows this, and while he will not give any definite reason for his
willingness to begin showing his work now, he hints that he would not
mind it if his life were seen as some kind of example.
"I guess there is a lesson in doing something on your own, in getting
self-fulfillment from your work if you don't allow yourself to be
distracted by outside forces," he said. "People think they are dependent
on outside feedback, but my lesson is that you aren't.
"An artist doesn't necessarily have to get acclaim from the outside.
Maybe it is much better if he can get validation from within."
[Photos] Aaron Rose in his studio. Three photographs.
[End]
25,000 Photos by One Artist: Glimpses Into Private World
"All around me I saw people who became cynical and
bitter when they didn't get the recognition they thought
they deserved, and I wanted to be free of that," he said.
"I wanted only to do my work, for myself, without any
commercial influences. For me there was simply never any
other way to do it."
By Paul Goldberger
New York -- Aaron Rose gets up around 5 o'clock every morning,
makes a cup of coffee and disappears into a small darkroom behind
the kitchen of his loft in Manhattan's SoHo district. There he remains
for hours, quietly mixing chemicals, creating negatives, and making
prints of photographic images he has shot himself. Then he emerges to,
as he puts it, "begin the business of dealing with people and all the
rest of life."
Rose, a soft-spoken man who is either 58 or 59 -- an orphan, he says he
has never been quite sure when he was born -- has spent his mornings
that way for nearly 30 years, during which he has created one of the
most remarkable oeuvres of any photographer in modern times. He has
made more than 25,000 images and printed each one by hand only once,
so that each picture is a unique work of art.
As remarkable as his deeply sensual images, which range in subject from
New York City to landscapes to still lifes, is the fact that as soon as
each print is done he files it away, showing it only to a small circle
of friends and collectors. His work is known to people within the
photography world, who have tried over the years to persuade him to have
a gallery show or let a museum display his photographs. He has
continually refused, saying he is not motivated by commercial concerns
and wants to be free to pursue his muse as he sees fit.
Aaron Rose's isolation is now coming to an end, however. He has agreed
to allow five of his photographs to be shown in the Whitney Biennial,
which opens on Thursday, marking what is, in effect, his debut. He is
far and away the oldest artist in this year's biennial whose work has
never been shown in a museum or a New York commercial gallery. But
unlike most artists new to the museum and gallery scene, he has not
been striving to break open its doors. Instead, he has defiantly turned
his back on the notion of even trying to earn a living from his art,
preferring -- rather like Wallace Stevens or Charles Ives -- to find
another mechanism of putting bread on the table.
In Rose's case, that mechanism has not been the insurance industry,
where both Stevens and Ives became rich, but the more modest route of
being a minor SoHo landlord. In 1969, looking for a way out of his
increasingly frustrating career as a commercial photographer, Rose sold
a collection of antique hand tools he had acquired over several years to
the Eli Lilly Co. for $250,000 and used $156,000 of his windfall to buy
the loft building on West Broadway where he still lives. He manages the
building himself, and the rental income from the upper floors and the
ground-floor retail space frees him to spend most of his time pursuing
his photography.
"The one thing that I knew early on in my life was that I never wanted
to become a disenchanted artist," he said the other day, sitting at an
old wooden table in his sparsely furnished loft. He speaks with a gentle
enthusiasm that manages to convey both an earnestness to explain
himself and an eagerness to get back into his darkroom.
"All around me I saw people who became cynical and bitter when they
didn't get the recognition they thought they deserved, and I wanted to be
free of that," he said. "I wanted only to do my work, for myself, without
any commercial influences. For me there was simply never any other
way to do it."
In 1969, SoHo was still largely industrial, just beginning to fill up
with artists. "Did anyone know back then what was going to happen with
SoHo?" Rose asked. "I only knew that I had found a huge place with
beautiful light, and it was cheap enough to let me do what I cared about.
The neighborhood had only a few artists back then. I had a printing plant
on the floor below me and a factory above me, and every morning the
machines would start to go, and I never needed an alarm clock."
The explosion of SoHo, which eventually squeezed out many of the
other artists who pioneered the conversion of the neighborhood,
paradoxically made it easier for Rose to fulfill his dream: the more
valuable SoHo real estate became, the more it assured his freedom from
the marketplace of art. His building has mirrored the evolution of SoHo
from an industrial location to the home of art galleries to a retail
center. For years, his ground-floor tenant was the Holly Solomon Gallery,
and now it is Smith & Hawken.
What makes Rose different from most well-to-do artists who do not
need to sell their art to survive, however, is the immensity, and utter
single-mindedness, of his career.
Separated from his second wife for five years -- "She just couldn't
understand the way I was working, why I wasn't putting my work out
into the commercial world," he said -- he has done almost nothing for
three decades except take photographs and develop them himself. He
has created a body of work that in both size and quality rivals that of
the most eminent photographers active today, and he has done it so
quietly that almost no one outside a small circle of cognoscenti knows
of his existence.
He is so determined to control the process by which his photographs are
made that he not only mixes his own chemicals but also builds his own
cameras and makes his own lenses, and he designed and assembled his
own darkroom. In an age when photography is moving rapidly toward a
computer-driven, digital technology in which photographs are seen as
collections of data bits that can be replicated an infinite number of
times, he essentially takes and develops his pictures by hand.
While Rose has sold a handful of photographs to collectors and friends,
he does so reluctantly, since he does not make images in duplicate and
each sale means the deletion of a unique element from his precisely
catalogued archive. His images fill a silent storeroom on an upper floor
of his building, where shelves are lined with gray box after gray box,
kept in chronological order, each one filled with photographs perfectly
matted and labeled. There they sit, like Emily Dickinson's poems inside
her trunk in Amherst, a trove of art as yet unseen by the public.
His work is not easily characterized, although it is distinctively his own.
He thinks of it as a matter of "taking chemistry and light as far as I can,"
and he is far more interested in probing the nature of photography itself
than he is in documenting the world, or in the art of composition, which
for many photographers is the prime creative act in photography.
Rose composes his images with care and precision, but it is the way in
which they are printed, with soft, glowing light and subtle tones that are
not merely black and white but include shades of pink and orange and
gold, that makes them truly remarkable. He often combines negative and
positive images in a single print, making a photograph seem more
abstract.
"The process is quite phenomenal if you just allow it to go," he said. "I
get excited by the way the light strikes the silver or the gold. I think
of myself as partly an alchemist."
He has taken his pictures in several series. There is a huge set of images
of New York City rooftops, 10 years' worth of pictures that are
tantalizingly balanced between abstraction and representation; a series of
photographs of seashells that are voluptuous, soft, and sensual; a set of
photographs of the Milky Way that look bedazzling, far from the crisp
and didactic feeling of much photography of the night sky; a set of
images of underbrush, magnificently portrayed from a worm's-eye view
and rendered monumental; and a series of sweeping landscapes that,
conversely, are rendered intimate.
Rose's pictures combine elements of Man Ray and Paul Strand, to name
but two of the photographers his work calls to mind, and his images
invariably give the viewer the sense that he is seeing something as never
before -- that he is seeing the world not merely reinterpreted but as
profoundly rethought. For this is photography that caresses the world,
that looks at it with a deep and gentle curiosity, determined not merely
to show the viewer something but to break apart its secrets and make of
them art.
By doing his work in private, and keeping his pictures mostly away from
the world, Rose intended to keep his own focus entirely on his work and
to avoid having it affected by the demands of the rest of life. Curiously,
however, he now runs the risk of having his life seem as intriguing as his
art, which can be dangerous for an artist.
After all, who in this age of media excess could not be fascinated by the
tale of an artist who turned away from publicity and was determined to
pursue his art without any recognition, not because he could not get it
but because he did not want it? In a time when publicity is mother's milk
for many artists, when the art market operates on the assumption that if
a tree falls in the forest and a major dealer isn't there to hear it then
it could not have made a sound, Rose's determination to go his own way
exerts nearly as powerful an allure as his work itself.
Rose knows this, and while he will not give any definite reason for his
willingness to begin showing his work now, he hints that he would not
mind it if his life were seen as some kind of example.
"I guess there is a lesson in doing something on your own, in getting
self-fulfillment from your work if you don't allow yourself to be
distracted by outside forces," he said. "People think they are dependent
on outside feedback, but my lesson is that you aren't.
"An artist doesn't necessarily have to get acclaim from the outside.
Maybe it is much better if he can get validation from within."
[Photos] Aaron Rose in his studio. Three photographs.
[End]