I was lucky enough to interview photographer and artist Rose Marie Cromwell, whose work from her photobook, El Libro Supremo de la Suerte, published by TIS Books in 2018, is on view as part of Turning the Page at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco. Cromwell’s exhibited work dwells within the everyday and its inhabitants as sites of luck, beauty, and memory. This body of work is shaped by Cromwell’s lived encounters with La Charada, a Cuban underground lottery and associated numerical system, and the community around her at the time of creating this work.
We spoke about these themes across the book and the exhibition, what it meant to be included in Pier 24’s final exhibition, and ongoing projects.
Sam Hiura: The exhibition had a very strong resonance with your photobook, El Libro Supremo de la Suerte, not only with the content, but visually and experientially. Since the exhibition and book are such distinct visual experiences, what was the process of translating a book into the exhibition space?
Rose Marie Cromwell: I think that this book has inspired the way I’ve continued to install exhibitions since then, including other projects or other books. But the goal of creating different sized pages was to create a nonlinear experience of the images together so that you don’t necessarily read it from—you know, when you turn a page, it’s very much like this image, that image. But this way it creates a changing relationship between the images.
And that was something I wanted to carry out in the space. The first exhibition I had was in Panama, an artist-run space called Antithesis. We realized that we could kind of do a similar thing in that space by making some images smaller in varying sizes, and by overlapping images too. So like how images get overlapped in turning the pages, they get overlapped using the adhesive vinyl in the framed photographs.
Also, there is a focus on objects in the book where I’m looking at different objects that have meaning to me. I was looking at really outlining my everyday life in Cuba and making things more monumental through the act of photographing them, so we even included some objects in that exhibition that we found in secondhand or thrift stores that were very similar to some of the things I photographed in Cuba.
SH: The textures in the exhibition were so rich, and I was curious about the relationship between the framed works and those printed on vinyl, as well as the significance of found objects in your practice in general.
RMC: The adhesive allows me to layer images and create these kinds of dynamic relationships with the framed image, and also allow some of the images to go even larger than would be feasible with framed images.
And then I’m considering the differences in the relationship between photography and sculpture, and also the sculptural possibilities of photography and how I can push that and keep those conversations going in my different installations—I think it’s a common thing for photographers to go to sculpture because suddenly we realize, why do we need the photograph?
Maybe just the found object, or the juxtaposition of objects, is good enough. So, you know, it could be a sculpture. I want my images to be also read as paintings, so there’s subjectivity there. It doesn’t need to be this objective photograph any longer.
SH: I was interested in a strong idea of place, or feeling of place among the works. What elements of the works capture that idea, or the feeling of Cuba to you?
RMC: I like to say that I do, as a photographer, come from this kind of documentary tradition about using photography to tell a story about place. I’ve always kind of been a traveler, lived in many different places. And Cuba became this place where I was being formed into my own personal development as a photographer after spending a lot of time there. I wanted to make it very much personal to me so it didn’t become cliché. Then I realized the best way to do that was to really concentrate on concrete things that are shaping my experience in Cuba. So I was doing that: reenacting different experiences that I had, different experiences of intimacy or moments of insight.
But I found a perfect kind of metaphor for this through my friend Milagro’s love of the underground, illegal lottery La Charada. Milagro was really my host in Cuba. I met her on the street randomly in 2005 and she became like an older sister/aunt figure. But her house was on a corner and there’s a lot of people coming in and out, so it’s also a great place as a photographer to meet people.
She was obsessed with the underground Cuban lottery by using La Charada, which is a Cuban-Chinese number system where every number has a meaning. So, like, two are butterflies; if butterflies flew through her house, she would play [the] number two. That was kind of a beautiful act to me—see[ing] how she was making her everyday more monumental through the act of playing it in the lottery.
I wanted to bring that metaphor into the book to then kind of explain what I was doing with the camera that was kind of parallel. It’s an ode to every day. It’s also, in talking about “place,”—places change too. So, this was very much a depiction of this time in my life, this place then. It was very much like a particular kind of place.
SH: That’s so interesting, thinking about how you naturally grow and change, and how that shows up in your work. Do you think that the work would still be so grounded in the everyday if you were to potentially go back and re-experience Cuba as it is now?
RMC: Yeah, I mean I do go back to Cuba often, but I’m working on different things. Now I’m kind of making more body work, similar to this, in a sense of performance, and the body, and intimacy. But making it’s really about my daughter and my mom. Because now I have a daughter, and at that point in my life I could just be wherever and immerse myself in different communities. And now I’m kind of attached to this person. My mother’s getting older.
If I was to make work about Cuba, it was very specific to like those people I met and that time. I don’t know if I have that same time in these today, which is kind of sad. If I went back to Cuba, I don’t know what it would be, but it wouldn’t be that.
SH: Something you also mentioned when you were speaking earlier about your socio-political position as a U.S. citizen visiting Cuba, and especially photographing the people in the neighborhood you were in, I was curious how you approach photographing a community that you may not already be a part of.
RMC: Yeah, it happened kind of gradually. I made some friends, I kept going back. My mentor, Sandra Eleta from Panama, was like, “Your intuition is saying go back. You should go back.” I went back and photographed, and gradually my hand became more apparent. The more you come back, the more you become part of that community. Even though I don’t live there full-time, I still go back, people still know me. I watched people grow up, like, kids are now adults. I think it’s always just with respect and bringing people along through the process, bringing people prints, bringing them books.
SH: I’d love to go back a little bit, you mentioned the lottery exchange and the number system that comes up a lot visually in the exhibition. I’d love it if you could tell me a bit more about how that shaped the work and your time in Cuba, as well as what the relationship between text and image is like across the project.
RMC: Milagro would keep these intricate number books of number triangle calculations and what numbers played when. One day I was looking through her book and I found my phone number was in all those numbers. I felt privileged to be in her number calculation. So I photographed the page and started thinking about those numbers more, and was inspired to use that in the editing process. But it became a narrative structure for the book instead of vague photos from Havana. I wanted it to be a nonlinear narrative that added in a sense of the story I was trying to tell. I think it also creates pseudo-chapters that give some sense of tension that happens in the book. There’s chapters with different numbers and titles on them that inform the photographs that come later, so they’re almost like a photograph in itself.
SH: That’s interesting. Does the title [El Libro Supremo de la Suerte] come from Milagro’s book, or is it a different origin?
RMC: So La Charada, the number system in Cuba, is illegal, because it implies you’re playing this illegal lottery. So it’s difficult to find printed copies of it. But a lot of people, like Milagro, know the whole thing. But I wanted to find a printed out copy, [and] I finally found one on Amazon. I ordered a little copy that was very similar to the numbers. Some things are different, but most of it is the same as what Milagro had told me by memory.
I thought the design in the book was kind of out there. It was a lot of, like, Google-searched images, kind of stuck in. I like that it came from the internet. It wasn’t this totally organic thing. I really liked the aesthetic of it. So I took that font that came on the book and used it on the cover.
SH: It is a very distinct typeface. That makes a lot of sense.
RMC: Whenever I bring these little booklets to Cuba, like, women or whoever would steal it from my book. There’s a little booklet that comes in every book with that system. So there’s a book within a book.
SH: Interesting how it continually comes up for you too.
RMC: Yeah. I’d say that there’s a certain aspect throughout my works, some kind of spiritual thread. I think it’s a spiritual practice to look at your everyday and assign meaning to it. It was definitely something for my friends to concentrate on, and it takes you out of your daily problems.
SH: Well, to kind of round out, I was curious what it means to you to be a part of the final exhibition at Pier 24. Did that come up in conceptualizing your work for this space?
RMC: It means a lot. It’s a huge honor to be with all these photographers that I’ve looked up to: Jim Goldberg, Robert Frank, Cindy Sherman. I mean, the list goes on. I also really respect Allie [Haeusslein] and Chris [McCall], and what they do. Working with them was a back-and-forth conversation, one that challenged me and I think made the exhibition better. The book had some great press for it, but never an opportunity to share it in a physical space so it was worth the wait to do it in this context of an [exhibition] about seminal photography books.
SH: Yeah. I felt like your work really held its own place in the exhibition, too, amongst all these other great works and artists.
Allie told me to ask you what you’re working on currently. She said you were working on some really exciting stuff.
RMC: Well, I have my first solo museum show right now up at ICA Miami. It’s called A Geological Survey, and it’s the work I’m making about my daughter and my mother, which is ongoing work, all made within the past two years and still explores the sculptural possibilities of photography. I’m also working on finishing an almost 20-year-long photography project about the Panama Canal.
It’s very rewarding, obviously, to be in shows that are about photography. But then to be in a museum context where photography is rarely shown is really special to me. I think [with] photography, people can see it differently, [as if] it’s the truth or can’t be conceptual. I love that it could be in the same space as other art mediums.
TURNING THE PAGE
Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA
April 15, 2024 to January 31, 2025
This review was made possible thanks to the generous support of Pier 24 Photography.