Em Rooney. Veronica's Horror. 2017

Em Rooney Veronica's Horror 2017

  • Not on view

It is common for photographs to become mementos: objects that live in special frames, positioned on a mantle or an altar, or placed in a dedicated box in the back of the closet. Rooney underscores this phenomenon in her work. She selects photographs from her personal archive and presents them with unique frames or armatures, some crafted from old books, some built anew from cloth, metal, glass, or ceramic materials. The resulting composite portraits are gifts or offerings to their subjects—not because they are literally handed over to them, but because they refer especially to them in their particular presentations.

Gallery label from Being: New Photography, 2018
Medium
Steel, book, and hand-colored gelatin silver print
Dimensions
42 3/4 × 17 3/8" (108.6 × 44.1 cm)
Credit
The Family of Man Fund
Object number
297.2018.a-c
Copyright
© 2022 Em Rooney
Department
Photography

Installation views

We have identified these works in the following photos from our exhibition history.

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].