her interest in challenging conventional representa-
tions. Her series,Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows
No Pain(1966–1972), features collage images of
women from advertising, fashion layouts, porno-
graphy, and other found sources. These images are
arranged into provocative arrangements that call
into question the intentions of both advertisers and
artists. Using glamorous views of women in seduc-
tive, conventional poses, she calls into question the
way in which women are objectified in advertise-
ments and the fact that they can be used as tools for
part of a larger patriarchal social system. In
describing her working method, Rosler states:
The subject is the commonplace—I am trying ...to ques-
tion the mythical explanations of everyday life. We
accept the clash of public and private as natural, yet
their separation is historical. The antagonism of the
two spheres, which have in fact developed in tandem,
is an ideological fiction—a potent one. I want to explore
the relationships between individual consciousness,
family life, and culture under capitalism.
(interview, Video Data Bank, The School of The Art
Institute of Chicago)
At the time she was working on theBody Beauti-
fulseries, Rosler was involved in the women’s and
civil rights movements, and in response to the
highly political atmosphere of the era, she created
a series of politically charged works. InBringing the
War Back Home (1967–1972), Rosler combined
images of American daily life as represented in
Lifemagazine with images of the war in Vietnam.
Her arrangements provoked viewers to reconsider
the consistency and luxury of American life at
home, far from the war where young Americans
battled and died daily.
Rosler moved from a collage technique to pro-
fessional photography production in the mid- to
late 1970’s. Her most widely acclaimed photo-
graphic series isThe Bowery in Two Inadequate
Descriptive Systems, (1974–1975). For this project,
Martha took photographs of the New York’s Bow-
ery, a place frequented by the homeless and drug
and alcohol addicts which was beginning to be
populated by artists’ studios in the 1970s. The doc-
umentary style of this work is similar to the efforts
of Walker Evans and others commissioned by the
Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, who
laid bare the poverty and dysfunction in America
caused by the Great Depression. Like much of
Evans’s work, Rosler presents empty locations.
By using vacant spots of the Bowery, Rosler
could communicate the world of an underground
subculture without exploiting its individuals. Her
presentation of the empty spaces in broad daylight
also put a spotlight onto locations typically fre-
quented at night. Beside each photograph, Rosler
posted a card of printed words, featuring words
and phrases used by the Bowery’s denizens, such
as ‘‘screwed up,’’ or ‘‘groggy.’’ The photographs
and texts together became a documentation that
communicated the subtleties of a subculture that
is either outright unknown or misunderstood.
Rosler’s photographs of the Bowery were also
suggestive of the alienation inherent in modern life
in urban environments. And while Rosler turned
increasingly to video production in the 1980s,
between 1983 and 1994, she worked on a series of
photographic images titledIn the Place of the Pub-
lic: observations of a frequent flyer. These photo-
graphs include shots of the TWA terminal tunnel at
New York’s Kennedy Airport, empty seats from
anonymous mid-western airports, jet airliners,
motion walkways, and many other components of
airport environments. The images capture the ster-
ile atmosphere of these facilities where strangers
walk in constant passage to other destinations,
and where aluminum guilded bars and panels dom-
inate the architecture. She manipulated her camera
to blur, highlight, and darken, creating images sug-
gesting a seductive, yet largely cold environment.
When compared with Stephen Gill’s photographs
of deserted airport spaces and bleak buildings and
Frits Rotgans’s photographs of airplane hangars,
Rosler’s series, because of the saturated colors and
provocative angles, seems an almost romanticized
take on airplane travel.
Between 1995 and 1998, Rosler created a series
of photographs of driving, included in the book
and exhibition Rights of Passage. These photo-
graphs show the view through the windshield and
document the backs of vehicles, signage, and the
asphalt atmosphere of the American highway. In
her essay which accompanied the photographs,
Rosler explained that she considered roadways to
be a critical component of the modern American
landscape and that she was captivated by them as
places of elusive liberation. Her documentation of
the roadways is contemporary to many other late
twentieth-century photographers such as Edward
Ruscha, who also photographed the sprawl of
manufactured spaces.
A general issue suggested in the photography of
Martha Rosler is that of surveillance. Throughout
her work, she takes the role of outside observer.
Like photographer Sophie Calle, she is a witness to
those who rarely take note of themselves. The inha-
bitants of the Bowery, busy travelers, and passing
drivers rarely consider themselves subjects for
artists. Her interest in political ideologies exposesROSLER, MARTHA