John Rosenthal

John Rosenthal’s photographs have been exhibited throughout the Northeast and South. His one-person shows include exhibits at the National Humanities Center; the Asheville Museum of Art; the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Duke; the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland; the Panopticon Gallery of Boston; Wake Forest University; Elon College; Salem College; Hollins University; the School of Design at North Carolina State University; the Tyndall Gallery; the Frank Gallery; the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge; and the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art. Rosenthal was awarded the 2008-2009 North Carolina Arts Fellowship. His work, including essays and photography, has appeared in various journals and periodicals including  the Hedgehog Review, ARTVU, Five Points, Carolina Quarterly, Big Bridge, The Sun Magazine, Key West Review, Kenyon Review, NCArts, Huffington Post, New York Magazine, The Arts Journal, and In Brief, Short Takes On The Personal,  and can be found in many collections including the NC Museum of Art and the Nasher Museum. He has written and lectured widely on his own work and the work of others, including presentations at the City Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, and the North Carolina Museum of Art, and has served as a visiting lecturer for five years at Duke University’s Institute of the Arts.

In the 1990s Mr. Rosenthal was a commentator on WUNC-FM and NPR’s All Things Considered, and in 1998 a collection of Mr. Rosenthal’s photographs, “Regarding Manhattan,” was published by Safe Harbor Books, which also included his work in the 2005 publication of Quartet: Four North Carolina Photographers. In August of 2008 an exhibit of his Lower Ninth Ward photographs, “Then, Absence,” was displayed at the New Orleans African-American Museum, the Center for the Study of the American South,  and Boston’s Panopticon Gallery. In 2010 these New Orleans photographs were exhibited at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design in Raleigh. In 2015 Safe Harbor Books published Mr. Rosenthal’s monograph, AFTER: The Silence of the Lower 9th Ward.  In 2021, Waywiser Books will be releasing Mr. Rosenthal’s memoir Searching for Amylu Damzer, which novelist Clyde Edgerton describes “as a once-in-a-lifetime reading experience.”

Ten Things I Can’t Do Without

1. My wife, Paula, and my two children, John and Laura
2. Quiet mornings
3. A good bar
4. Self-mockery
5. Rain
6. Proust
7. The inefficiencies of art
8. Dreams of departed loved ones
9. Conversations about novels and poetry
10. Unfalsified photographs