Photographer Rose Marie Cromwell was born in Sacramento and raised in Seattle, and has lived in Florida for the past nine years. Her professional projects in Cuba and Panama, undertaken through a Fulbright scholarship, inform a practice shaped by movement across varied landscapes, geographies and histories. Her work is anchored in the documentary tradition, and reflects an awareness of the medium's historical role in colonial observation and representation while reimagining it through an intimate, embodied feminist perspective.
Inspired by the writings of Joan Didion, Cromwell examines the relationship between the body, memory and place. Working primarily in black-and-white film, she draws on the legacy of classical documentary and landscape photography, referencing photographers including Ansel Adams and Robert Frank, particularly his documentation of American life in the 1950s, while interrogating the romanticized traditions embedded in that canon. Her photographs investigate resource extraction, ecological transformation, and the ways the female form exists within and alongside the landscape. Through portraiture of her mother, her daughter and herself, she considers generational continuity, the aging body, and familial healing.
For the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, Cromwell has expanded into video, creating an immersive environment that extends her exploration of non-linear narratives and embodied experience. In her gallery, folding books and silk panel prints disrupt expected sequencing and chronology, allowing images to exist in layered dialogue rather than fixed progression.
Press release issued by Orlando Museum of Art:
https://omart.org/news/under-a-drenching-sun/
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