Rose Marie Cromwell’s work sets individual narratives in the context of wider social and economic shifts. Challenging the conventions of documentary photojournalism, her photographs point up the tension between the real and the fabricated, the aesthetic and the political, between moments of authenticity and constructed scenes.
Time is an important medium in Cromwell’s work. Her projects typically develop over sustained periods, allowing her to form extended networks and long-term relationships with people and places. These close emotional ties to her subjects and their surroundings give Cromwell the means to look past visual stereotypes and rethink the documentary genre in playful, inventive ways, using the camera as a tool for creating intimacy. Her work sets realism alongside metaphor and symbol, mixing lyrical figurative images with portraits, still lives, and constructed tableaux. Richly colored and deeply shadowed, Cromwell’s photographs are strikingly beautiful, her gaze lingering on subtleties of light, texture, and detail.
Though her practice is driven by a strong sense of environmental and ethical awareness, politics finds its way into Cromwell’s work in oblique ways. Rather than blunt statements of fact, her photographs are subjective explorations of her relationship with specific geographies and communities. They are poetic meditations on the human cost of globalization and the spiritual dimensions of political consciousness. They transform everyday objects and events into dreamlike scenes, alluding to wider concerns and asking viewers to imagine the documentary photograph as a form that engages reality in abstract and expressionistic ways.
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