Rising Artist Rosemary Haynes Is Asking—Is Staged Photography Really Just Theater?

AGE: 26
BASED IN: New York
NOMINATED BY: Justine Kurland

I began a real relationship to making pictures in 2021. I brought a monorail 4-by-5 camera to my hometown [in Western Massachusetts] and asked my family to sit in front of it. In 2007, we lost my stepmother due to childbirth-related complications. My younger brother, Sam, lost his mom before they ever really got the chance to meet. I sought to make a family album that could bring the abundance of her past to our present. These pictures are part of a body of work I call ‘Arnica,’ and the work belongs to my family first, me second.

I experience a lot of tension around making photographs of people I love, a continual push and pull between whether the work is a vulnerable act of witnessing, or if I’m asking friends and family to serve as conduits for something else. I actually enjoy the idea that the work could be entirely performative—thinking about pictures as theater, my peers as convenient actors.

I guess I’m interested in contradiction: making images that are both tender and fictitious. My hope is that pursuing "and" and not "or" can at least confuse, if not break, conventions around narrative or post-documentary photography. Photography can serve as a tool to communicate something beyond what we are capable of addressing through words. I learned that with my camera I could be a witness. Making pictures is a way for me to show a lot of love that I don’t always know how to share with people.