It’s been just over 50 years since a man clutching a handful of brochures walked into a Cambridge camera shop and changed Ron Rosenstock’s life forever.
The man was Minor White, the influential American photographer and teacher, and the brochures were about a workshop he would be offering at his home. “I just looked at it and thought 'I’ve got to do this,' ” Rosenstock said. So he signed up, a move that kicked off an incredible series of events that eventually led to his becoming a renowned photographer in his own right. That was in 1967, and a woman who was in White’s class with Rosenstock connected him to the Worcester Center for Crafts, where he began teaching in 1968 and where he remained for many years.
In recognition of that five-decade milestone, a retrospective of Rosenstock’s work will open Jan. 18 in the Krikorian Gallery at the center, 25 Sagamore Road, with a reception from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. The show runs through March 3.
“It’s been 50 years since he started teaching and building up the photography program at the Worcester Center for Crafts, so this exhibition is really honoring a place that helped Ron build his art, build his teaching experience and kicked off his career,” WCC Executive Director Honee Hess said.
Rosenstock went on to reach photographic heights that include exhibiting his work in more than 100 shows worldwide. Among notable local achievements were a solo show at Worcester Art Museum in 2011 and acquisition of his work for permanent collections at WAM, the Fogg Art Museum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the International Center of Photography. After leaving the WCC, he taught photography at Clark University, retiring after 30 years.
In addition to setting him on his life’s path, the WCC led him to the love of his life as well. Shortly after he started teaching there, he met his future wife, Cathy, when she signed up for a summer course Rosenstock was teaching. After they married the couple eventually moved to Holden. “We figured we’d buy this starter home,” he said. “That was probably 40 years ago, and I guess we’re still getting started because we’re in the same house.”
Rosenstock’s photos have often been described as "ethereal" or as having a mystical quality about them, largely because the way natural light plays upon the landscape has been a central theme for him. In more recent years, he began serving as a guide leading photography tours all over the world, finding natural beauty at every turn. His photographs have a strong sense of place, but they are not documentary.
“I would call them interpretive,” he said. “Some of them you can look at and say, ‘Oh, that’s Ireland’ or ‘This is Maine,’ but I’m not trying to make postcards. I’m not documenting anything. I’m trying to interpret the connection that I feel with the light and shadow and texture that’s in front of me.”
The photos invite the viewer to look beyond the physical reality of a place and any identifying landmarks. “There’s a spiritual side to them,” Hess said. “Even though they’re very much realistic photographs, you really get a sense of the depth of the place and the spirit behind it.”
Rosenstock is best known for his landscapes, although he does some portraits as well. He works mostly in black and white, and occasionally in color. Of the 30 or so photos that will be in the show, all but three will be black and white, he said.
Those three are color portraits which, like his landscapes, evoke their subjects’ inner qualities as well as the outer ones. “Even though the portraits are in color and they’re of people, it’s the same idea,” he said. “It’s much more interpretive than documentary.”
Part of that vision was formed through Rosenstock’s longtime connection with White, a mentoring relationship that went beyond that initial workshop and lasted until White’s death in 1976.
“After that workshop I volunteered to help him in a project he had publishing a few books,” Rosenstock said. “I helped him hang shows. I worked pretty close with him for many years.” White gave Rosenstock his first solo show, an exhibition at MIT, where White taught. It was a mentorship many a young photographer would have envied.
In a 1974 story about White’s final show at MIT, The New York Times wrote that he was once described by an admiring colleague as “a teacher, critic, publisher, theoretician, proselytizer and house mother for a large portion of the community of serious photographers.”
Rosenstock was working in the Cambridge camera shop when White came in with those soon-to-be life-changing brochures. “There was that little inner voice that said to me, ‘This is an opportunity you can’t possibly miss regardless of circumstances,’ ” Rosenstock said.
“Circumstances” meaning “money.”
“It was $500 for this private workshop with Minor White,” he said. “I was going to Boston University part time and working in the camera shop part time and I just didn’t have any money whatsoever.” But he remembered that his parents had taken out a life insurance policy for him when he was born. “I rang my mom and I asked if we cashed that policy in today what would that be worth,” he said. “She checked it out and she said, ‘Exactly $500.’ It was one of those things that was meant to be. Literally, it changed the course of my life.”
Even before working with White, Rosenstock loved landscapes and seascapes. Often on weekends he’d go up to Pemaquid Point in Maine, staying overnight in a seaside inn so he could easily be on the shore in time to take advantage of the gently kaleidoscopic light of sunrise.
“I just love the ocean and it was just so wild, so natural, especially at Pemaquid Point,” he said. “It was like this kind of burning. I didn’t know quite why I was so involved in photography but I had no choice. There was just something driving me.”
A big change came in 2002, when Rosenstock began shooting digital photographs, a shift he had not been eager to make. “I gave up film only because, as a teacher of photography, I really had to keep up with what people were doing and what they want to learn,” he said. For a few years he shot both film and digital, but the more he got to know about digital the less he worked with film.
“I was really fumbling around, just sort of learning the process for about five years,” he said. “If I could have erased those five years or compressed it, it would have been film-to-digital with nothing in between but there was this gap where it was very, very difficult because I wasn’t comfortable with the process. It was a little hiccup in the middle but then I kind of picked up where I left off.”
So what keeps him inspired after 50 years? It’s a question that taps into a deep vein of creativity and passion, and an enthusiastic answer pours out like a rushing river in spring.
“Even though it’s been 50 years I feel like I’m just getting started,” he said. “It’s like a quest that I’ve been on my entire life and it’s kind of a spiritual quest, really, because I feel this contact with nature. I often use the word ‘communion,’ and I don’t mean it in an offhanded way. I mean it very seriously. With nature, I often feel part of it. I think we are all part of something much bigger and when I’m at the ocean or in a forest or some beautiful place it just kind of nourishes me in a certain way. It just gives me this feeling of belonging, a feeling of purpose. It makes me happy. That’s a big thing in life. You want to wake up in the morning and be happy with what you do, and I am. I love what I do.”