Snow and Rose & Other Tales
by Marianna Rothen
If Playboy Magazine had been taken over by an aberrant feminist collective for a month in 1978, and this collective had seen Altman’s 3 Women and Polanski’s Repulsion one too many times, the resultant photographs might look a little like Marianna Rothen’s work, which is to say: fantastic. Rothen’s photographs are funny, alluring, and utterly distinctive. She achieves her milky colors and fading, monochromatic look by combining digital and instant-film processes. Thanks to this, her images really do seem of the era. She was influenced by films from the 1960s and ’70s, both obscure and classic, especially “the pauses in between dialog or shots, how each frame was like an image with just enough clues to elude at the plot, the personalities of the women: always tormented but always in control.” Rothen’s images are those odd, unsettling pauses, which now seem to have disappeared from our hyper-speed visual language, but not from our collective memories.
Marianna Rothen was born in Canada and lives in New York City. After becoming a model at age 15, Marianna spent several years traveling, working, and documenting the experience through photographs. Rothen now focuses her photography on female characters within the scope of a nostalgic dystopia. Combined with decrepit interiors, wilderness, and seductive subjects, Rothen’s photographs emanate overtones of mystery and dissatisfaction that become part of a larger narrative. Since 2007 her work has been exhibited internationally and in 2014 her first book, Snow and Rose & other tales, was released with b.frank books. Marianna is currently completing a new series of photographs, Shadows in Paradise. Visit her website here.
Spurl Editions Recommends:
Marianna Rothen’s Snow and Rose & other tales
John Brian King’s Nude Reagan