We are all fascinated by images of human faces. The first picture I took with my box camera at the age of six was of my best friend at school. Over the years, I’ve done portraits for hire to show people at their best, improving their social mask, as well as other portrait series that strip away the social mask to find the human, the vulnerable or the universal. I believe a successful portrait reveals more than mere appearance to have broad and lasting significance.
Although portraits have been in my artistic repertoire since the 1970s, it is photographing bodies in nature, especially abstract nudes reflected in still water, that has dominated my fine art photography career. In 2018, I expanded my nudes in water to include the heads of models and made an image called Dialogue that associates an actual human profile with a reflected one.
Dialogue broke boundaries, leading me to create images that evoke interior thought processes not visible in conventional portraiture. In that photograph, a young woman gazes intently at her reflected face, implying a conversation within herself, the kind we have internally all day long, but nobody witnesses. How interesting it would be, I thought, to add reflected faces to my portraits to convey inward and outward parts of our selves simultaneously.
This new series In Reflection was inspired by a photograph of a young woman. It has evolved via work with models of different ages into portraits of older people, bearing life’s experience. The images speak to the progression of time, to youth and aging, to looking within, and to making peace with our mortality.
Karin Rosenthal’s abstract photographs of nudes in nature have been exhibited internationally, collected widely, and reside in 17 museum collections, including Boston’s MFA, the Brooklyn Museum, the ICP, and the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG). They have won numerous international awards and have been shown and sold at the prestigious AIPAD exposition in NYC. Her photograph in First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography at YUAG was selected to represent the show of 100 images by famous 20th Century photographers and was featured in the New York Times review. At the Griffin Museum of Photography in 2016, she curated 37 Photographers/ One Model with nudes in nature by her and her workshop students of a male dancer in his fifties, overturning conventions of nude photography. As a Resident Artist/Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center in 2013, she initiated and oversaw an exhibition of photographs by Vivian Maier. A book entitled Karin Rosenthal: Twenty Years of Photographs was published in conjunction with a retrospective of her Nudes in Water Series at the Danforth Museum in 2000.
