Nancy Rexroth

A revelatory exploration of the work of the American photographer widely known for her pathbreaking 1977 photobook, IOWA.

The first major study of Nancy Rexroth (b. 1946), Secrets of My Power furnishes a missing account of her life, work, and career as she established her artistic voice in the experimental 1970s and challenged prevailing approaches to photographic image-making. This book locates Rexroth’s practice in a period often associated with those of Diane Arbus, Francesca Woodman, and the early work of Sally Mann.

Tracing Rexroth’s career from her first photographs to her discovery of the Diana camera and through her exploration of digital tools in the early 2000s, Secrets of My Power presents numerous works which have never previously been made public. These include experimental stills on film, a 53-image carousel slide show, and a corpus of self-portraiture. Together with rigorous analysis of her previously known work, these new discoveries help to distinguish and connect Rexroth to key artistic formations of the American photography world in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, including contested social and creative terrain around feminism and gender, technical experimentation, engagement with language, artistic networks, and photography’s emergence in universities, museums, and the art market.

Accompanies the exhibition Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power on view at Cincinnati Art Museum, OH.

Many prestigious institutional collections within and beyond the United States have holdings of Rexroth’s work, including MoMA, NY; National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; Baltimore Museum of Art; Baltimore, MD; Minneapolis Arts Institute, Minneapolis, MN; and Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; and Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France.

Nancy Rexroth is an American artist best known for her evocative 1977 photobook, IOWA, regarded among photographers as a unique accomplishment in the history of the medium. In the 1970s and 1980s, Rexroth exhibited at institutions including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Center for Creative Photography, Smithsonian American Art Museum, International Center of Photography, and LIGHT Gallery. She earned an MFA in Photography from Ohio University in 1971—one of only a handful of women to do so in the period—and in 1973 was among the earliest photographers to receive a Visual Artists Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Ohio.

Dr. Nathaniel M. Stein is curator of Photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum. He led the formation of The Nancy Rexroth Collection—a globally unique archive encompassing the artist’s complete output, working materials, and papers—and has worked closely with Rexroth for nearly a decade. Selected prior publications include The Natural World (2022), The Levee: A Photographer in the American South (2020), and Interference: Andre Bradley and Paul Anthony Smith (2017). He lives in Ohio.

Dr. Molly Kalkstein is the Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University. Her scholarship on the American photography world of the 1970s has appeared in journals of record including Photographies and The History of Photography.

Charlotte Ogorek is the Rexroth Project Assistant at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Dr. John Rohrbach is curator emeritus, formerly senior curator of Photographs, at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Rohrbach has authored or contributed to numerous highly-regarded studies on American photography, including Paul Strand, Time in New England (1983); In the American West, 1979-1984 (with Richard Avedon, 2005); Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke (2007); Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision (2009); Color: American Photography Transformed (2013); Reframing the New Topographics (2013); and Fortune of the Spirit: Robert Bergman (2025).