We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rosemary Jesionowski. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rosemary below.

Alright, Rosemary thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My parents are both creative people! My mom is a very active visual artist and my dad practices creativity in his daily life. They both studied art in college and continue to approach life filled with passion for the arts. Growing up, my sister and I were always supported in our creative endeavors. We took many art courses at various art centers, made weird art at home, and I spent my teenage years and first year of college studying dance. To help us learn to read, my dad hand-made these huge, pink flash cards and attached them to objects throughout the house! In my memory, these were something like three feet wide, but I was pretty small at that time. This kind of activity contributed to an environment where I never questioned the importance of creativity in the everyday. Because art was such a part of my childhood, I don’t remember a moment when I decided I would be an artist; it was always part of who I am, and I’m grateful to my parents for encouraging that.

Rosemary, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am an artist and educator living between Richmond, VA and Lake Charles, LA. My primary medium is photography; I have a BFA from Ohio University and an MFA from Indiana University. I teach photography in the Department of Visual Arts at McNeese State University and maintain a strong personal practice, exhibiting all over the country and internationally.

My work has long been about human relationships to place. How do these relationships define and sometimes change us? A few years ago, I set out alone to travel across the United States on a three-month photographic road trip. I would capture the landscape on film and make albumen silver prints (a photographic process popular in the mid-late 19th century) along the way. I envisioned myself following the proverbial path of photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan with his darkroom on wheels and Eadweard Muybridge with his mammoth plate camera documenting Yosemite. I created a modern equivalent of O’Sullivan’s portable darkroom- a custom built cabinet to fit perfectly in the hatchback of my Subaru, with compartments for chemistry, paper, and equipment. I outfitted myself with a monorail view camera and several lenses.

My route took me through sacred places that are personally and/or culturally significant. I drove from Rochester, NY, through the Badlands of South Dakota to my birthplace at the base of Mount St Helens. I meandered down the Pacific coast, dipped into Yosemite and then headed inland over the Rockies to my childhood playground in Colorado. I sped through Texas to land in Louisiana, a place I now call home for part of the year. I photographed all of it.

As I drove, I spent a lot of time thinking about my place in the history of photography. While the medium has been much more accessible than say, painting, to women throughout its short history, this particular arena of photography has always been (and is still) vastly dominated by men. Perhaps this is because wandering out into the land takes a certain sense of adventure that girls so frequently are not encouraged to explore as children, or maybe it’s the physical demands of carrying a camera (though I do know of several women who are working in the landscape with significantly larger cameras than the one I use). What does it mean to be a woman conquering the landscape? I certainly don’t feel as though I have conquered it, more so, I feel reclaimed by the land and the places that are significant. I have a romantic relationship to place and landscape.

This romance with the landscape is largely why I chose to print this body of work as albumen silver prints. They have an inherent romanticism to them. My images as albumen prints are tangible and yet fantastic. They represent some sort of reality, but it is certainly a skewed reality. The images are of both place and time, yet… they are timeless. One of the most beautiful aspects of an albumen print is its luminosity. This glowing quality comes from the fact that the image itself is suspended in egg white above the surface of the paper. Light passes through the albumen layer and bounces off of the paper, giving the image subtle backlighting. This is not lost on me as I am in the field, under my darkcloth, watching the light, thinking… about place, about time, about history.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I think the most rewarding part of being an artist is communicating with others. Part of our human experience is making connections and understanding the world together. Making and exhibiting artwork is an incredibly important part of this equation. When I’m out in the field photographing, I meet new people, and in discussing my process, I connect and learn. When I exhibit my work, I’m providing the start of a conversation. I love talking to people about my work in the gallery almost as much as I love listening in as viewers talk to each other about my work. This dialogue is why I make art.

With my other hat on, the most rewarding part of being an educator is seeing students find their own voices. They begin their academic journey following assignments and learning the technical nature of photography, and as they continue, they begin to recognize that they, too, can add to the dialogue of the human experience.

Have you ever had to pivot?

2020 was an incredible year for us all. Part of it was incredibly challenging, but part of it was incredibly freeing. At this point in my career, I had been teaching at the same university for 11 years and had just returned from a semester-long sabbatical, which provided me with the time and space needed to reflect. My reflections led me to realize that my work environment was no longer supporting my own life goals. As the world was shutting down, my world was opening up. I made the decision to leave my (now former) position in pursuit of happiness. I landed in my current department after several virtual interviews and I could not be happier.

Contact Info:

• Website: rosemarykate.com
• Instagram: @great_albumen_tour @rosemarykate_studios
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/RFFlmL4jClo

Image Credits
Rosemary Jesionowski