Ann B. Rosen fell in love with photography as an undergraduate and continued this work through graduate studies at SUNY, Buffalo, working with Joan Lyons, Keith Smith and John Wood focusing on printmaking and bookmaking. She combined text, paint and abstract photographs in her early work. Amid life changes, Rosen’s work transformed into photographic portraiture. Her images expose a vulnerability and strength in her subjects through facial expression and body language.

In the Presence of Family: Brooklyn Portraits portrays how families are transformed through biracial adoption, LGBTQ+ parenting and intermarriage. Rosen photographed families at street fairs in Brooklyn in the early aughts and photographed them again ten years later creating photo books that reflect their personal and ethnic family stories. Being Seen is a project to bring understanding and dignity to women living in homeless shelters, formerly homeless women living in permanent shelter and Afghan women refugees. The portraits, exhibited with oral histories, reflect their instability and resilience as they struggle to recreate their lives.

Rosen has received grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council for her family portrait project and the Puffin Foundation and the Genessee Valley Council on the Arts, for her project, Being Seen. She’s created new work in residencies from the Project Space, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester; the Mauser Foundation, Costa Rica and 360 Xochi Quetzal, Mexico. Solo exhibitions include Five Myles Gallery, Being Seen, Part I and Part II, and Webster University, In the Presence of Family: Brooklyn Portraits. Group exhibitions include Abrams Art Center, NYC, Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Burchfield-Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY, Brooklyn Museum, NYC and CIIS, San Francisco.

Rosen’s work is a permanent part of the Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Burchfield-Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY. Her work has been written about in the Village Voice and NY Times. Her books are in the permanent library collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and International Center of Photography.

Ann Rosen

Ann Rosen