"Even now, I don’t promote myself. I do photography because I love it. Money isn’t going to make a better picture for me and it is not going to make me happier. I wasn’t working for the work to be shown or seen, I was working for the pleasure of doing the work itself. I guess the reason I didn’t show my work is I was always busy going onto the next thing."
From "Interview: Aaron Rose’s Coney Island" (Popular Photography, 2014).
What did you like about shooting at Coney Island?
The gutsiness. To be amongst people in the flesh... where else can you find such a great array of shapes and forms?
What were some of your favorite scenes to shoot at the beach?
I liked the big fat men. When they laid down their bellies stuck out and bulged out. I just find it very comical, very cartoonish.... It’s the real people... kind of stark reality, in a very sunny atmosphere.... I used a Leica 35 mm camera with a wide-angle lens and a slight telephoto lens....
No one ever saw me taking their picture, that much I know.
How were you able to keep people from realizing that you were photographing them?
I would look, just like everybody else observing on the beach.... I would walk by with my camera on my side. I never put the camera up to my eyes. They never saw me taking their picture, but by that time I knew I already had the picture in my field and I just continued walking on...
Lots of photographs at the link, where I got via "Aaron Rose, Photographer Whose Work Long Went Unseen, Dies at 84/Spurning commercialism, he made thousands of one-of-a-kind prints that for decades he largely kept to himself. Then came a show at the Whitney" (NYT).
Mr. Rose was that rarest of artists: one who doesn’t chase after gallery shows or sales to deep-pocketed collectors. In a 1997 interview with The New York Times in advance of his Whitney Biennial debut, he explained that his low profile had been by choice. “All around me I saw people who became cynical and bitter when they didn’t get the recognition they thought they deserved, and I wanted to be free of that,” he said. “I wanted only to do my work, for myself, without any commercial influences.”...
You might guess that he was living on family wealth, but it was quite the opposite:
Aaron was raised in foster homes.... His introduction to photography came when a portrait photographer he had met at one of those foster homes hired him as an assistant to hold lights and reflectors....When Mr. Rose graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in 1955, he went into commercial photography and eventually began shooting pictures for his own pleasure.
On the side he collected antique hand tools, which proved a vital pastime: In the 1960s he sold his collection of tools to the Eli Lilly Company for a considerable sum, and in 1969 he used the proceeds to buy a building in SoHo, a neighborhood that was about to transition from industrial to trendy. He rented out part of the building to support himself and lived and worked in the rest...
Absolutely perfect!
Mr. Rose made his own cameras and other devices, and Rebecca Hackemann, who was his assistant and archivist from 1999 to 2005, said his studio was a sight to behold. “It was littered with glass and silver globes, optical devices and cameras he had built himself that replaced lenses with pinholes,” she said by email. “It was like walking into a different century.”
In his darkroom, he spurned the ready-made chemicals available from Kodak and other manufacturers; its walls were lined with bottles and cans full of mysterious substances....