Adulthood Tales By Rose Marie Cromwell

Cromwell believes that everything is political, and is interested in the relationship that this has to the spiritual. When observing her work in line with this outlook, her subjects stand to defy outsider expectations, be it a forehead of a young boy captured peering over a wall or an outworn table-top fan held together by layers of shiny brown tape. Her images of objects, often abandoned in blazing sunlight, appear as commonplace forms ready to be translated to still life studies on canvas. Similarly, her portraits carry a painterly quality, reflective of the relationships she nurtures along her travels. In her series ‘King of Fish’, Cromwell documents the coming-of-age of Vladimir, a boy from Coco Solo in Panama, which she considers to simultaneously be a place of paradise and oppression. The photographer documents her own transition into adulthood in ‘El Libro Supremo de la Suerte’ (The Supreme Book of Luck), a series that collates her experiences of Havana, where she lived for eight years.