Aaron Rose - Photographs : Essay and interview by Alfred Corn

“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.”

—Paul Goldberger, New York Times
Aaron Rose has created one of the most remarkable bodies of work of any photographer living today, and for most of his career he did this in isolation, in a single-minded quest for visual enlightenment. He was virtually unknown to the photography world until five of his prints were exhibited at the 1997 Whitney Biennial, when he was in his late fifties.
Rose’s images—completely original visions of trees and plants; sun, stars, and clouds; shells; the New York City skyline—are miracles of light and chemistry. A magician who builds his own cameras and mixes complex developing solutions incorporating exotic metals, Rose has spent the last 35 years taking and superbly printing more than 25,000 photographs, most of them from negatives that he printed once or twice and then put away forever. This book offers the first-ever presentation of Rose’s work, which has been quietly collected by major museums over the past few years, as well as a vivid portrait of the man himself, speaking to author Alfred Corn about photography, science, art, and commitment.

Alfred Corn is a poet, novelist, critic, and adjunct professor of writing at Columbia University in New York. His articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, ARTnews, and other major publications. A Fellow of the Academy of American Poets and the recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Fulbright fellowships, Corn's books include Notes from a Child of Paradise, The Various Light, and All Roads at Once, among others.