Aaron Rose has created one of the most remarkable bodies of work of any photographer living today, and for most of his career he did this in isolation from both the art world and the world of commercial photography, in a single-minded private quest for visual enlightenment. He was virtually unknown to the photography world until five of his prints were exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in 1997, when he was in his late fifties.

Rose’s images - completely original visions of trees and plants; sun, stars; and clouds; shells; the New York skyline - are miracles of light and chemistry...

AARON ROSE was born in New York City in about 1940. Orphaned at a very young age, he was raised in foster homes in New York. In his early twenties, Rose became a successful commercial photographer and also began to amass a superb collection of antique tools, scientific instruments, and photographs. When he sold his tool collection to the Eli Lilly Foundation in 197O, he was able to buy a loft building in SoHo that produced enough income so that he could afford to quit his commercial career and work at his own photography independently. During the following thirty years, he produced a body of work unequaled among contemporary photographers: more than 25,000 prints of superb quality and workmanship. When they were finally discovered by the art world in the late 1990s, Paul Goldberger, writing in the New York Times, likened them to "Emily Dickenson’s poems inside her trunk in Amherst, a trove of art as yet unseen by the public."

the perpetuity of light 

ALFRED CORN

shells 

new york city 

milky way 

reflections 

unterholz 

sun and clouds 

sky 

a discussion with aaron rose 

chronology