sub rosa
1995-1997
sub rosa a. & adv. (Of communication, consultation, etc.) In confidence, under express or implied pledge of secrecy.
[L, lit. under the rose, as emblem of secrecy]
By the mid 1990s I was still doing Liquid City but also looking at how I could work with that most traditional and well-documented of subjects: the nude figure. As usual, what I was looking for only began coming into focus once I got to work on the images. And what seemed to be recurring were qualities that created a tension with the sensuality of form — qualities revolving around an uncertain opaqueness, an acute evasiveness, matters that had planted themselves firmly in my emotional life at the time. What helped me along was discovering — initially through some lovely Polaroid accidents and later by more conscious refinement — a set of techniques that could both obfuscate and meld the formal elements of the picture. Rather than irradiating the subject, these interventions shaped the image into something darkly evanescent — a dreamlike aura that mirrored the sense of life, including erotic life, that I would find myself slipping in and out of.... Eventually I'd print the thirteen pictures that became sub rosa. (Frank Rodick, 2017)
