About the Artist
Most photographers start with the camera. For Michael Rosenberg, an interest in photography was first sparked in the darkroom. It was during his time in graduate school, at the University of Toledo, where he was earning a PhD in biology. “I was printing electron micrographs for my thesis,” he says, describing the technique for creating highly detailed images of microscopic specimens. “It was magical. To see the image develop, stabilize, and then you’d created this tangible photograph you could hold in your hands.” His professor encouraged him to use any darkroom supplies that would soon expire, and since the chemical process was the same for developing film photography, Rosenberg unpacked his old 35-mm camera. “I started taking pictures in black and white and developing them in the departmental darkroom, sometimes staying up until two or four o’clock in the morning, printing my own work.”
Rosenberg had entered the field of biology as a way to address unanswered questions about his own body; he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 14. After earning his doctorate, he worked as a genetics and cancer researcher at several academic institutions as well as for several biotech companies, including GlaxoSmithKline.
But photography remained a serious passion. Rosenberg is retired and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His photographs have been featured in several exhibitions in North Carolina as well as in private collections and museums. He primarily works with a large-format, 4-by-5 camera to capture dramatic landscapes like the rocky shores of the Oregon coast or the starkly lit dunes of Death Valley, but he is also drawn to abandoned structures, like old factories and farmhouses in disrepair. Scenes that were once alive, and maybe, through his images, still are. His series on a shuttered tobacco factory near his home evokes, through their very absence in the photos, the lives of the people who once worked there.
Rosenberg’s focus on large-format photography has a surprising source. In 1989, Rosenberg lost sight in his left eye as the result of complications from diabetic retinopathy. He also lost the ability to distinguish shades of greens from blues. “Because of my eyesight, large-format photography seemed like a natural fit, since the viewing screen is so much larger,” he says. Far from a hindrance, Rosenberg finds that, in some ways, he now sees in the same way that a camera sees.
“I see things less for their colors and more for their shapes, which means I see the composition more clearly. I’m not distracted by the colors,” he says.
“Plus, having monocular vision, I don’t see things in three dimensions. I see things two-dimensionally. That is, to me, a huge advantage. I’m better able to visualize the final print, which is something Ansel Adams talked about, this idea of previsualization.”
“You have to have imagination,” Rosenberg adds. “You overcome any difficulty for something you’re passionate about.”
Adams described visualization, or previsualization, as “the ability to anticipate a finished image before making the exposure,” a reminder of the link between the moment the photograph is taken and the craft of the development process.
“They go hand in hand. When you take the picture, you have to know how you’re going to develop it,” Rosenberg says. “It is the job of the photographer to compose and crop the image to engage and keep the viewer’s interest within the boundaries of the print. Then there’s the quality. The precision of the mounting of the image, the care of using museum-quality, acid-free papers.”
Rosenberg appreciates this meticulous nature of photography. “The creative outlet is very fulfilling,” he says.
On the Cover: North Dakota Farm House and Hay Field
“The North Dakota climate is harsh, with the amount of snow and wind,” Rosenberg says. This photograph is part of a series he took while traveling through the farms and prairies of the Great Plains. Just like the crumbling tobacco factory in North Carolina, houses like this one stood out as symbols of once-lived lives.
“It was as though I was working at the farm and that was my home, and I was walking up to it after a hard day’s work,” he says. “Now of course the house was in disrepair, but it wasn’t that way for the people living there. You just see the passage of time.”
Beyond the house itself, the mood cast by the surrounding landscape also caught Rosenberg’s attention.
“It was the sweep of the mowed hay across the front, leading out to the field. And the clouds coming over the house drew attention and focus to it,” he says. “It had a rhythm you look for in any photograph to keep the viewer inside the picture.”
