SFBG: Your photo series "The Beach" dates from Carnaval in 2006, depicting men on Ipanema Beach in Rio. One striking aspect of this series is that your portraiture isn't only solo. Three of the five photos are of duos, or pairs, of men. How did that come about? I'm also wondering how the men pictured responded to being photographed.
JR: Ipanema Beach is right in the trendiest part of the urban center, so it is very much a place to see and be seen. It is absolutely loaded with social codes of fashion and behavior. Each part of the beach is home to a specific clique or type of social group. There is a quieter section of the beach where there are a lot of families, a raucous section filled with teenagers smoking pot and playing soccer, a gay section and so on. I was interested in the people on the beach in terms of what defined and created the boundaries of their groups. Photographing people together was a way of thinking about the cultural visibility of social groups and the production of their public images.
When I first decided I wanted to do this project I got a lot of doubtful responses. People thought that guys on the beach wouldn't allow me to photograph them because it would embarrass them in front of their friends or would somehow seem publicly emasculating. Of course, when you go around asking a lot of people to take their picture, some percentage of them are not comfortable being photographed. Sometimes the men needed a bit of coercing from their significant other! But I'd say that in general people were flattered that I wanted to photograph them and were interested in the project.

Bag by Jessica Rosen, at www.jessicarosen.com

SFBG: "The Girls From Avenida Mem de Sa." has some obvious differences from the 2006 beach portraits -- here, you're exploring and portraying the feminine instead of the masculine. Also, this series makes strong use of varied settings. Can you tell me a bit about these qualities of the series, and about the process of making one portrait?
JR: My own relationship to femininity was certainly what fueled my interest in "The Girls from Avenida Mem de Sa" and was a key aspect of my connection to that community. This project is quite different from "The Beach," but their similarity is that both projects were compelled by my concerns about the cultural recognition and visibility of individual identity. I am always interested in the strategies people use to communicate what they know about themselves. For "The Beach," I was interested in the ways that people group together on the beach and the physical and behavioral signifiers that they use to identify themselves. In creating "The Girls From Avenida Mem de Sa," I saw a community that was forming strategies and alliances to support the communication of a rather complex and fluid notion of self. In both cases, I am looking at how people produce a public image that feels in sync with their internal notion of self.
One practical reason that the settings are varied in "The Girls from Avenida Mem de Sa" is because I worked on this project for about three years. My relationship to my subjects and to the project itself evolved over that time. When I first began, I was shooting only snapshots in the street at night. Then I wanted to have more control and spend more time creating each portrait. So I began renting rooms in the motels where the girls would have ordinarily taken their clients. This was great because I could spend more time with each girl and the portraits became much more intimate and elaborately constructed. As I spent more time with this project I started to become more personally acquainted with some of the girls. This was where the project really opened up, because they began inviting me to photograph in their homes during the daytime while they were not working. Being in a person's home is a much more personal type of interaction. We could hang out, talk, drink coffee and listen to music without them feeling rushed by the urgency of their working hours. Even though I preferred the comfort of working in their homes, I think it enriches the series to have moved through these different vantage points.

Photo from "The Girls from Avenida Mem de Sa," at www.jessicarosen.com

SFBG: In "Night Visions," from 2007, you turn to the "Love Motel" as a setting. What drew you there? What did you find in terms of mood and look, and in terms of human experience? Also, you've begun to integrate male and female subjects into one series, and I'm wondering how that came about, and how you think gender or sexuality informs the portraits if it does.
JR: My interest in Love Motels began while I was working on "The Girls From Avenida Mem de Sa." During that project, I took photos in about 20 different motels and I was really intrigued by them. I loved the furtive indoor parking lots to keep your car out of sight, the gaudy, colorful décor, and the unusual appearance of condoms and lubricant on the room service menu. I also like the possibilities offered by being able to rent a private space for such a short term. Your lease expires after only few hours, but in that time you can use the space in any way you like. I also think it's interesting that this type of venue is so ubiquitous. It is really identifying a widespread need and social desire. I have heard Brazilian people talk about love motels not only in terms of prostitution or infidelity but also as an integral part of any committed relationship. They can be an important private refuge for a couple.
The ideas addressed in "Night Visions" are less bound by the specificities of a particular gender than my other projects. It made sense to combine both male and female subjects because love motels are a cultural phenomenon not limited by lines of gender or sexuality. This project is also heavily seated in thoughts about sex work and the commodification of sexuality. I wanted to address those ideas in a way that was more about a general human condition rather than a condition of gender.

Photo from Jessica Rosen's "Night Vision" series, at www.jessicarosen.com

SFBG: Your most recent work involves collage. What prompted this transition? Is your collage material strictly imagery that you've created, or are your mixing your photography with shards or slices of other images to make pieces?
JR: For practical reasons, I started collaging because I wanted to have more control over my images. I wanted to be able to build my own images rather than being limited to existing places or people for content. Because of this desire for control, I use all my own original photographs. In this way, my work becomes a bit more like painting than photography. I am able to construct my images from the ground up and have very specific control over the color palate, scale and structure of each part of the image.
Conceptually, collage is also a good strategy to articulate my ideas about the structure of subjectivity and my concerns about cultural recognition. I have been thinking about subjective identity as a continuum or a cumulative layering of experiences that combine and condense over a lifetime. Unfortunately, we have to exist in one moment in one place in one body so usually a huge percentage of our experience is left unarticulated and unrecognized. The nature of collage is to combine and condense imagery from different times and locations together into one image. I am taking that grand opportunity offered by collage to lift the spatial and temporal constraints of everyday life. Through collage, I want to create a space to be able to articulate the complexity of internal self without succumbing to flattened stereotypes of identity.

Collage by Jessica Rosen

SFBG: What do you foresee in the near future, in and outside of your photographic lens?
JR: Right now, I have a two-month solo show up at Keys That Fit. I'm really excited about it because the space is a storefront window on 23rd and Telegraph in Oakland. This offers me an opportunity to show my work to a very public audience and also to install my collage in a more sculptural way. I will also be changing the installation for the month of September…so keep your eyes peeled if you are on Telegraph Ave.
I also recently started making one of a kind photo collage handbags from my own original photographs. They are really cool (if I do say so myself!) and I am having a lot of fun making them. I have them for sale on my web site www.jessicarosen.com.
And I'm gonna go visit my mom in Maine next week ☺.