about & cv
Rodick manages to embed in his images things that are completely and specifically personal but through an alchemical visual transmutation makes them universal. We see the story of his mother, his father, of him, but before we know it is our mother, our father, ourselves. Life, death, and the human condition are made both mysterious and immediate.
— Stephen Perloff, founder and editor of The Photo Review
For a less formal, slightly lengthier biography, see “No Maggot Lonely: Thoughts from a Life in Art.” (Counter Arts, June 2021).
Born to a family of booksellers in Montreal, Frank Rodick’s photo-based work engages the worlds of acute subjectivity and intense emotion. The issues in his imagery, coming from the intimacies of his life, are elemental and primal: fear, mortality, and trauma, all seen through the lens of memory and the subconscious, and manifested in expressionistic representations of the human face and figure. Spanning 30 years, he has plied the photographic medium unconventionally, integrating analogue and digital photography with film and video, and drawing inspiration from multiple art forms, particularly painting and literature.
Concurrent to his art practice — and critical to its development — Rodick trained and worked as a psychotherapist for over 20 years, which expanded and deepened his sensibility for the essential issues and obsessions of his own life, as well as the most private experiences of others. Mirroring the history of his own family, among the thousands of clients he encountered were those traumatized by experiences of abuse, illness, racism, and war.
untitled self, no. 44
From the series untitled selves, ©Frank Rodick, 2017
Widely exhibited across four continents, Rodick’s work sits in permanent collections of more than twenty public institutions globally, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Brandts Museum of Denmark, The Kinsey Art Collection, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the National Gallery of Canada, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Yale University.
Books and monographs include; Of Liquid Cities and Celestial Abattoirs; Liquid Cities (Alt Take); and Labyrinth of Desire: Work by Frank Rodick. The former was named to several “best of the year” photo book lists, including those of the International Center of Photography and the Photo-Eye Blog.
In addition to studying cinema and photography, Rodick has degrees in political economy and psychology. Combining his psychology background with his art practice and teaching experience, he designed and teaches workshops focused on developing the creative process of working artists. He is also a writer whose essays have been named Editor’s Choice multiple times by Medium and Wordpress.
His most recent work, The Moons of Saturn, was named the overall winner of 2021’s Pollux Awards juried by Stephen Perloff, founder of The Photo Review. In 2023, he and Nancy Brokaw published a book by the same title.
Acquiring work by Frank Rodick:
Printed in limited editions, email info@frankrodick.com for information including prices and edition size. If you’re in interested in particular images, please specify if possible.
The human mind continues to be one of the most uncharted frontiers of all. From his beginnings as a photographer, Frank Rodick has consistently explored this terrain, breaching the crenellations of the cerebral cortex to probe the limbic system, where our animal selves hunker.
— Katherine Ware, Curator of Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art