About the Art

Milton Glaser, the award-winning designer, observed that “the great limitation of most designers, now, is that they can’t create form, they can only find it. Or if they create it, it is rudimentary and clumsy. One of the reasons we are in the era of collage rather than observation is because most people don’t know how to draw. So that skill which appears to be an academic skill is actually a means to be able to visualize things,”  The same can be said for much of today’s photography, the inspiration for which is drawn not from looking at the world or one’s personal experience of it but rather, like the Uroboros—the mythic snake eating its own tail—from looking at other peoples’ images on digital screens and then composing similar ones on the digital viewing screen on the backs of their cameras.  These images are then enhanced on larger computer screens so that they will better call attention to themselves on the crowded shelf space of the image-marketplace, a venue already crammed with the works of artists shouting, “Look at me, look at me!” and, where if a photographer is lucky enough and the photographs arresting enough, their creator will be noticed and celebrated for their promised “fifteen minutes.”

 As Rogers was born closer to the 19th century than the 21st, he still draws his subject matter from his day-to-day life. His aesthetic approach involves a classic search for “beauty” utilizing traditional principals of harmony and symmetry, an approach congruent with that of design advocated by Glaser.  Rogers find that that approach as well as the appreciation of it is as rare today in photography as it is in design.  “Seeking the whisper of the sublime, of the spiritual and the unbidden in the ordinary has become increasingly difficult in the cacophony of contemporary life,” Rogers wrote. “And today, finding an audience capable of appreciating it in a hyper-monetized art world that overvalues celebrity and shock is like panning for the last nuggets of treasure in a washed-out gold field,”.  If still on the public shelf at all Rogers is, for the moment, shoved far to the back with a long-passed expiration date.

That said, Rogers has been writing and publishing about photography since 1978.  Although the journals are academic, the ideas they contain are those of an artist, not a scholar and as such, in the aggregate, represent his “artist’s statement.” 

The images are combined and recombined into portfolios or hand bound into books organized around a particular theme or motif.

Technical information:

  Technically, his work falls into two areas: the first is traditional B&W photography using film and a gravure printing process.  The second area is color, in which Rogers works with four-color gravure printing as well as an image transfer process of his own innovation. The four-color gravure printing required that Rogers devise a means of registering the four plates on a simple hand-operated intaglio press that was sufficiently accurate to reproduce the finest photographic detail.  The transfer process is similar to that used by many contemporary alternative photographers but is based on the transfer of archival inkjet images rather than laser prints or color Xeroxes typically used. His technique is unique in that as it employs archival, pigmented inkjet images his prints have a finer resolution, greater saturation and better permanence and stability than laser transfers.  Rogers came upon this particular transfer technique serendipitously. It was made possible by an "adhesion problem" associated with a particular commercial inkjet paper that allowed for the removal of the paper substrate without having to wet it, which would have destroyed the underlying water-based image.  Unfortunately, this paper is no longer available; the manufacturing flaw was soon "remedied" by the manufacturer. There is no replacement available and at present no other technique or material Rogers know of that will allow this type of dry transfer of inkjet-based images. Fortunately, Rogers stockpiled enough for many years of future creative output.

 It also should be noted that the images on this website are not photo-reproductions of these techniques but rather downgraded, digitized versions of the scans of the film-based originals.  As such they are merely a general skeletal outline of what the underlying foundational images look like, let alone the actual print—information, not a source for aesthetic experience.  Since the transfer process is unique there is for a viewer of this digital rendering no experiential reference for its appearance, other than perhaps “fresco-like,” unlike the gravures which have antecedents in the world, memories of which a viewer might be able to overlay.  However, since this is a website, the question is more academic than aesthetic.