| Claire Rosen | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Alma Mater: | Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) |
| Known For: | Photography |
| Notable Works: | Birds of a Feather |
| Style: | Conceptual |
Claire Rosen (born in 1983, in New York) is an American fine-art photographer. She was included in Forbes magazine's "30 Brightest Under 30" list for 2012 and 2013 in Art & Design.[1] [2]
Rosen's artistic style often incorporates anthropomorphic animals, along with archetypal heroines and symbolic still-life arrangements that draw upon the aesthetics of classical painting, influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and referencing the Victorian era. Her work has gained international acclaim and is held in numerous public and private collections.[3]
Born in New York in 1983 and raised in New Jersey, Rosen is the eldest daughter of Dolly and Edward Rosen. Her mother is a culinary historian specializing in Victorian-era cake baking, and her father is a banking and intellectual property lawyer. She has younger sisters whom she would drape in sheets and pose as Greek goddesses in the family's backyard when they were children. Her mother read to them from Grimm's Fairy Tales, Beatrix Potter, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and L. Frank Baum.[4] Rosen was also taken on frequent trips to the zoo, the circus, and the Museum of Natural History, which fostered a love of animals and taxidermy that has carried into her art.[5]
As a youth, she was interested in art but didn't express herself visually until college when she took her first photography class.
Rosen attended Bard College at Simon's Rock, where she first pursued photography. She graduated with a liberal arts degree in 2003. She attended Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), where she learned technical skills and met Steve Aishman, a physicist-turned-photo instructor who became a mentor to Rosen. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography in 2006.
Rosen moved to Maine after graduating from SCAD to complete a three-month internship with Joyce Tenneson at the Maine Media Workshops in Rockport. Following the internship, Rosen remained in Rockport to manage Tenneson's studio for two and a half years.[6] It was there that Rosen began reading the works of Carl Jung, Freud, Joseph Campbell, and Bruno Bettelheim, which have subsequently impacted her work. She met Cig Harvey, who became a role model for Rosen. It was also during this time that Rosen created Fairy Tales and Other Stories, which is a series of self-portraits, and Dolls in the Attic.
In 2009, Rosen moved back to New York and began working independently as a fine artist. She exhibited photos from her two series in juried shows. Fairy Tales received attention, and some images were licensed by magazines to run alongside articles. This marked the beginning of Rosen's crossover into commercial work, wherein she began creating commissioned images for book covers, clothing designers, and other organizations. To date, Rosen has created commissioned work for National Geographic Magazine, Fujifilm US, Alex Randall Chandeliers, Neiman Marcus at Short Hills, Smithsonian Magazine, Random House Book, and several other businesses and magazines.
In 2010, Rosen photographed the vintage taxidermy in the collection of the Millbrook School in Dutchess County. She was selected as an artist in residence for the school. The collection contained 10,000 eggs, and approximately 500 taxidermy animals, birds, and reptiles, dating back to the early 20th century. This series documents the history of these pieces, photographing them with their original records when possible and isolating each piece on a black background.
Birds of a Feather was created in 2012 and was Rosen's most widely seen photographic series. The images featured portraits of exotic birds against coordinated wallpaper backgrounds. Live birds were photographed against complementary historical and reproduction wallpaper and fabric from the Victorian Era. Rosen explained of the series:
The Industrial Revolution and colonization created this disconnect from nature in the Victorian Era and yielded an awareness of faraway places, amazing creatures, and unfamiliar culture. This series references that desire to possess the beautiful and exotic.
The collection also included common pets like parakeets as well as exotic birds like the Hyacinth Macaw. Rosen discovered Bird Paradise, the "largest exotic bird superstore," in New Jersey while trying to find a toucan to photograph for a commercial project and was inspired to do a photoshoot with the birds in the store. She created sample images with her own pet parakeets and the photos were set up as portraits with traditional portrait lighting. Rosen bought sheets of wallpaper from Waterhouse Wallhangings to serve as backgrounds for the portraits.
In 2014, Rosen created a photo series entitled Fantastical Feasts[7] , which featured animals eating around banquet tables in compositions that allude to Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. Each photo in the series featured a different species—including elephants, tapirs, sloths, miniature ponies, goats, mice, parakeets, honey bees, hedgehogs, etc.—eating the foods it prefers. Ron Haviv, New York photojournalist and owner of VII Photo Agency, assisted with the project and New York retoucher Rebecca Manson worked with Rosen on the images.
Rosen has taught workshops around the world, including at B&H, Gulf Photo Plus, SCAD, and the Hallmark Institute of Photography. Recently she gave an artist talk at the National Geographic Photography Seminar in Washington DC.
At the encouragement of Beth Taubner, creative consultant of Mercurylab, Rosen researched her ancestry and discovered that her maternal grandfather, who died when her mother, Dolly, was sixteen, was a fashion photographer in Hollywood. He photographed female starlets, posing them with animals. Rosen discovered this fact months after taking similar photographs herself.