Peter Rosenbaum is known for his fashion photography but he speaks in an unpretentious vernacular that reflects his gritty roots inf West Rogers Park. When the late iconic photographer Victor Skrebneski left his freelance gig at the Chicago Tribune in 1994, Rosenbaum took over freelance fashion shoots for the paper.It was a colorful walk down the runway for a guy who grew up working as a waiter in Chicago. “I fell up a lot,” Rosenbaum said in a June 2024 phone interview from his home in a farm town between Columbia and Jefferson City, Mo. “Sometimes you work hard and sometimes something just happens. If you’re prepared for it, it works out. That happened a lot. I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted a better job than being a waiter.”
Peter Rosenbaum was born on Sept. 5, 1958, in West Rogers Park. His parents Marsha and Satch were blue-collar workers. “Not much education,” he said. “Both first-generation Americans. They grew up not speaking English. My dad was Chicago-born, my mom was born in Ohio. My dad’s parents were Eastern European Jews and my mother’s parents were Greeks.”
Rosenbaum attended Senn High School, the same place that produced comic Shecky Greene, jazz singer Anita O’Day, and Clayton “The Lone Ranger” Moore. “When I went there it was rock n’ roll rumble,” he said. “Crazy. I liked it. It took kids from something like eight different public grammar schools. West Rogers Park, Sheridan Road-Lake Shore Drive, Uptown. There were different ethnicities. My grammar school was all white so it was wild going to school with kids screaming in the hallways and clouds of smoke coming out of the bathrooms. It was great.”
In 1981 Rosenbaum obtained a liberal arts degree at Northeastern Illinois University. He worked restaurant jobs to pay for school. “It was no big deal,” he said. “I didn’t go to graduation. I think I got a diploma in the mail. But that’s where I first learned to use a camera. Talk about the shock of your life: practicing and learning something to become good at it only to learn it became obsolete while you were in the darkroom. But knowing the darkroom gives you a good foundation for producing any kind of digital imagery. I’m glad I know it. My goal with digital prints is to make them look no different than a darkroom print. Sometimes you can tell a digital print, sometimes you can’t. But I did what I always thought I would do; which was work in restaurants.”
I got fired from my last restaurant job in 1987. “Like I said, that’s when I fell up.” But the doors didn’t open up at first.
“I would take my work around to people and they’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t know what this is about” Rosenbaum said. “My portfolio had a bunch of random stuff. It was genre agnostic. At that time in Chicago you were either a portrait photographer or a still life photographer. A food photographer was separate. Or you did people, which was portraits but not fashion. Fashion -- an oxymoron in Chicago"
Rosenbaum’s biography is purposely open and free. In part, he says, “...I think of myself as a photographer, singularly, rather than a fashion, still life, or food photographer. In the simplestway, all of my images are portraits.”
Could Rosenbaum elaborate?
He thought for a minute and answered, “I only photograph people that I’m interested in for whatever reason. The same thing with objects. Ultimately when a photographer makes a portrait it is not always about that person, right? It is how that photographer sees that person. I think of myself as taking a self-portrait of other people in a certain way. What differentiates six people shooting the same portrait of the same person? Same lighting, same equipment, same wardrobe. It is going to be six different pictures. Hopefully if they are good, none of them will relate to each other (laughs.) That’s what I mean. Whatever you do if you draw pictures, paint pictures or photograph things they become imbued with everything that has been inside your life.” “Don’t you think? How did Sebastian Salgado (Brazilian economist-photojournalist) become an amazing researcher and documentary photographer? Other people shot that same shit for years and all of a sudden someone comes along with this way of looking at things that blows your mind.”
Rosenbaum paused to collect his thoughts. 'You’ll have to forgive me,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I talked about this. Any photographer who does a portrait is not really capturing a picture of that person. You’re capturing a picture of what you think that person is. I’m trying to think if I took a portrait of someone I hated.” Apparently Rosenbaum never made photographs of politicians. He laughed and said, “No. Well I did photograph Jane Byrne once for Chicago magazine. It was in my studio. That was a studio portrait.”
“I didn’t have the personality to shoot celebrity stuff, power people things,” Rosenbaum said. “I knew people that photographed with a lot of commotion, publicists and managers. Everybody saying, ‘This, this, this.’ I never was attracted to it. Even when I was shooting fashion everybody wanted to hear music. So I’d put on some old punk rock or the Cowboy Junkies. The girls would go, ‘Uh, do you have any other kind of music?’ Nope. I more less like to work quietly. I never liked big crews even though I did a lot of work with big crews. On location at the end of a day I’d just go to my room or out with my assistants for a burger, rather than go out for an elaborate crew dinner. When I was 18, 19, 20 I was a white dope on punk. A lot of kids went to the Art Institute, a lot of kids were art students. All the cool kids. A bunch of my friends made clothing so I would take pictures of them. They were
interesting and that was what was in front of me. I would do that and take pictures of my hammers and shoes. Anything.” But things really fell up in February 1994. Ann Moorehouse (now Vogel) was Rosenbaum’s long-time stylist who began doing freelance fashion editing and styling for the Chicago Tribune. (In July 1994 The Smashing Pumpkins management hired her to style for them.) Between 1991-93 Vogel also was a freelance assistant stylist with Skrebneski.
In 1994 the Tribune had three free standing fashion issues: women in the spring and fall and men’s in fall, along with weekly fashion stories. Then-Tribune features editor Brenda Butler contacted Vogel. Vogel is a Chicago native who grew up in the fashion world. She remembered the 1980s work of
Chicago-born fashion photographer Stan Malinowski (1936-2024) who also shot for Playboy, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue magazines."That faded out by the time I got into styling in 1991,” Vogel said in a July 2024 interview from Washington, D.C. where she is managing director at a design consultancy. “Then there was Skrebneski. That was it. We never had Richard Avedon, Irving Penn or Stephen Meisel that came out of Chicago. When I had the Tribune opportunity, Peter was the only photographer that had the New York-Paris sensibility. He had a global view of fashion, culture and art. He didn’t
try to copy trends, he interpreted. What drove his work was his love and appreciation of fashion,design and photography. He was my natural choice."
Rosenbaum was her lodestar.
Rosenbaum and Vogel had been working together since 1991, collaborating on catalog, commercial and advertising work. “Nothing sexy,” she said. “The Tribune was locally focused. Rather than reaching out to the showings in Paris, Milan and New York, they reached out to the (Chicago) retail stores and got whatever they sent them. It was boring. They’d shoot an Armani or there would always be an evening gown. There was no real interpretation of what the fashion season was. There was no thinking behind it.” Butler gave Vogel and Rosenbaum the green light to dress up the beat. Vogel developed stories
on current fashion trends and hot designers. “If you look at that time before the influencers and the bloggers, the editorial from Vogue and the New York Times had an intellectual approach,” Vogel said. “That was never the Chicago Tribune. I don’t mean to degrade them, but it wasn’t. They looked at themselves as a small local paper, but it wasn’t. Especially when you think of all the stores that existed in Chicago that carried all the fashion. I started getting designers that were breaking through, the ‘if you know, you know’ designers.”
Rosenbaum added,"The weekly freelance stories for fashion were two or three pages. They were done by on-staff photographers. But I started working with Ann doing the weekly stories. Something happened (not sure what), but I got the next big seasonal story. I had the second story and Victor had the first story. After that I got both stories. It had an impact. “Bridal was always sort of the armpit of fashion photography. Now it is a little different, but back then it was sort of a loser thing. We did a Tribune bridal story and shot gianormous expensive designer gowns in an abandoned hair shampoo factory. Another shoot of bridal wear was shot in the abandoned Uptown Theater, Beautiful dresses in crumbling locations:that created a crazy contrast with elegant dresses."
"We did stuff like that. We shot an American designer story on our farm here. We took a whole crew to Missouri. Designer stuff was always being represented as European or Japanese. We shot all the American designers which was beautiful"
Vogel said, “One of the gowns we shot on the farm, I can’t remember the designer, but he called me because someone from Hillary Clinton’s office saw the dress and was interested in him doing something for her. I don’t know what happened with that. Aretha Franklin saw a dress we shot and wanted to contact the designer who was Isaac Mizrahi (Born 1961 in Brooklyn, N.Y.) to see if she could get a dress like that. It was a thing. People saw it in the
Tribune.”
In the early 1990s Rosenbaum’s home and studio was on Wabansia Avenue, about a block east of Damen Ave. in Bucktown. “Back then it wasn’t the best place,” he said. “We were shooting for the Tribune and samples (dresses) came in from Paris or New York. Whoever sent it out did not put that a signature was required. Fed Ex left it at the door and my building was on the alley. And it got stolen. There’s only one set of samples from every designer.”
Then, for the 2002 spring fashion section, Rosenbaum delivered a stunning blue-gray portrait of a young woman in a Commes des Garcons cotton dress with large eyelet collar. She brings the viewer into her world. “My stuff was cooler,” Rosenbaum said. “Different models. I’m a fan of Victor’s. I own one of his prints and I think it is one of his best images: a 1967 portrait of Vanessa Redgrave. She’s topless with her arms covering her chest, her head is in profile and her hair is blowing. It is iconic. Partly because it is a nude of a celebrated and serious actor. For its time it was incredibly daring and modern.”
Rosenbaum is a man who lives in the moment and he considers all that is around him when he shoots fashion. Everything is important. He explained, “One component is not more important than the other and that includes the photographer. If the model is not right, it’s not going to work. If the hair and makeup aren’t right, it’s not going to work. If you are trying to make something of the moment, everything has to be of the moment. You can’t rely on things you’ve done for the last 12 years of your career and think it is still going to be relevant. Especially in fashion. But every genre’ has its cycles. You’re seeing the change in food photography, how it went from a picture full of stylists tricks to make everything look unapproachably perfect.
Suddenly you saw more naturalism occurring in food shots in magazines. A lot more natural light, a lot more environmental. It didn’t change that much for packaging food but for advertising it did."
“You never thought that food shots could be beautiful. And then they were. Photography became more artisanal than functional. People in New York were leading the charge on that, people like Maria Robledo, who photographed only with natural light. No one shot food that way. Food was always on a set. It sat there until everything got shot and approved. It was glazed with mineral oil and whatever. You can recognize a Victor (Skrebneski) photo. It’s his light, but it is not just his light. It is his models and the way he has the hair and makeup done all the time. It is consistent. If someone gave both of us an outfit of a pair of underwear and a tee-shirt, he would do something with a woman totally made-up with her hair in a big messy thing, looking and posing sexy and the light would be dramatic. I would do that same outfit and tell the girl, "Stands against the wall and pretend like no one is here.’ It’s the same thing but it is a different expectation. I never wanted to see anybody posing.”
When Skrebneski left the Tribune, Rosenbaum took over his beat. “They were giving me the assignments instead of him which I thought was weird,” he said. “He was a big deal. I was nobody. I was happy about it.” “We shot a ton of stuff,” Vogel said. “I’d think about newsworthiness and historical importance of the stories. When Prada did their first men’s collection we ran it before Vogue did. We shot (young Spanish designer) Miguel Adrover for a full story while he was still on the rise. We did a lot of things like that. Expanding the knowledge of designers and bringing that to the readers and the market was important. Before there were fashion photographers in Chicago doing standard commercial work. Montgomery Ward was a big client for a lot of people. We were able to get out of the regular routine in a way. In terms of fashion, we were able to break through some barriers.”
“The big stories became 8, 10 pages long and I would get paid dirt to make pictures.”he said. “I would basically fund the editorial. Why was I doing this? Our work increased their ad revenue. I know that. When I started I was excited. It was a big opportunity and we were getting models from New York and hair and make-up people. It was worth it to put my money into it because they didn’t pay you enough to produce anything other than a picture in
a studio. I wanted to do things. We had the talent and the wardrobe. The opportunities to expand my portfolio and make it competitive would have been lost."
“One season (1998) we came out of minimalism and everything became embellished again. I said, ‘Let’s shoot in New Orleans.’ What location is more embellished than New Orleans?” Rosenbaum and Vogel organized a field trip to the Crescent City’s Garden District, punctuated by venerable mansions and vine-covered iron fences. He explained, “The patina of New Orleans was perfect for opulent garments. Putting a model in extravagant and costly dresses in dilapidated and darkly festooned environments created a quiet tension that is part of the DNA of my aesthetics. The images were portraits of contrast. We took everyone to New Orleans for five days. I think they paid me $2,500 for it. I think the shoot cost like $17,000.”
Imagine that for a Chicago daily newspaper. Imagine any Chicago daily newspaper even having a fashion section today. Rosenbaum continued, “You know that thing about any artist or illustrator, they don’t pay because you get ‘exposure’. The payoff. I’d venture to say that when I worked for the Tribune
I never got one call from that work from Chicago. Do you know who I got calls from? People in New York saw it."
After Rosenbaum and Vogel left the Tribune they continued to collaborate in the 2000s on fashion marketing, production, and advertising. Their clients included Marshall Fields, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Lane Bryant and Wilsons Leather. Vogel later shifted out of styling and fashion work.
Rosenbaum is not retired but his energy is focused on being a caregiver for his long-time partner Lupus Garrett. Rosenbaum moved to Central Missouri in 2017 where Lupus decamped after a successful run as a painter-sculptor in Chicago. “I’m in the country in the middle of nowhere,” Rosenbaum said before picking Lupus up from a dialysis appointment. “The closest town is Jamestown, about 12 miles from my house. Maybe 200 people. I’m pretty isolated which feels right for right now. It’s one day at a time.” Rosenbaum has temporarily put aside his Hasselblad, the camera he always used in studio and on
location. “I don’t consider myself retired although I’m not interested in client work anymore,” he said. “I used to say, ‘What’s that bad word that starts with a c and ends with a t?’ Client! I haven’t used my camera for a while. When I first got here I did a lot of still-life stuff because I spent a lot of time during the day doing nothing. But since dialysis started a couple of years ago there’s been ‘scheduled turmoil,’ I guess. I’ve done a couple of portraits here and there.”
And yes, he has done several portraits of Lupus. “He’s still working,” Rosenbaum said with tones of pride. “He’s from exactly where we’re living. The farmstead goes back to 1832.” And you can be sure that Rosenbaum’s portraits of Lupus are as deep as the farm is old. Everything is important
.----Dave Hoekstra.
