Chloe Rosser

In Chloe Rosser’s meticulously composed photographs, bodies lean, bend, twist, and morph into something both completely familiar and entirely new. Posed like marble statues in soft, natural light, Rosser strips away layers of extraneous visual information, leaving the viewer to hone in on the finest details – a scar, a fold of skin, the curve of a shoulder blade, and to focus on something more universal.

Inspired by Edward Weston’s sharp still lives and sculptural nudes as well as Marina Abramovic’s experiments in trust and co-dependence with her partner and fellow artist Ulay, Rosser explores the relationships we have to our own bodies, and the assumptions we place on other people’s. She doesn’t show gender. She only asks us to question the associations we make between physical traits and the gender binary: as well as why we’ve been conditioned to see things that way. She allows the unretouched skin tones of her subjects to become a part of the larger color pallet of the imperfect and weathered rooms in which she places them. Each flaw is intentional, left for us to consider in place of a hand or a head.

In her two series ‘Form” and “Function,’ Rosser creates beautiful, intimate spaces where bodies are seen and admired for the work they have done in carrying us through the world. Her subjects allow her to shape them into new forms, and in doing so she creates a symbiotic support system based on trust, respect, and a deep understanding of what it means to not just have a body, but live in it. To recognize these forms as human beings is to honor their poise, strength, and stability, and to acknowledge that despite the things we carry in our backbones and bare feet, we are all made of the same basic parts. 

Chloe Rosser was born in 1991 in London and currently resides there today. She attended Falmouth University where she received her Bachelor’s in Fine Art Photography. Rosser’s artwork has been highlighted by a variety of publications including The Huffington Post, The British Journal of Photography, and The Wall Street International. Her photographs have been exhibited all over the world, including The Athens Photo Festival, Greece, Shibuya Cultural Center, Tokyo, Japan, and The York Art Gallery, England. She has won numerous awards such as 1st place at Tokyo International Foto Awards, Artslant Prize Showcase #3, and her works were shortlisted for the British Journal of Photography, Portrait of Britain in 2019.