Rod Cook

Rod Cook was born and grew up in Savannah, Georgia. He first picked up a camera while a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, fell in love with the medium, and subsequently worked as a fashion and illustration photographer in New York for the first twenty-five years of his career. In 1997, he gave up commercial photography to pursue a personal vision, seen in Cypress Knees and Tupelos, nudes taken in cypress swamps in and around Savannah, Ga. Since then he has created his own interpretations of botanicals, FP and Fungi, landscapes, Moving Landscapes, masks, mannequins, statues, and Animate Objects.

He has works in platinum/ palladium, digital black-and-white and color, and invented color prints married with encaustic. Rod generally works on projects inspired by spontaneous experimentation that requires venturing into other mediums. When he was younger, he was in love with the idea of being a photographer. Today, he says, he just wants to create images. A subtle differentiation but one he thinks is significant.

His most recent works are prints of nudes wearing Venetian style masks that he designed and made with papier-mâché – in the case of Mask they are created from molds taken from the model’s face). He is currently working on a body of work with his wife Penrhyn titled “French PostCards.”

Rod’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibits including Jack Leigh Gallery, Savannah, GA; Photosensualis Gallery, Woodstock, NY; 22 Haviland Street Gallery, Norwalk; Hunter Fox Gallery, New York; Bassetti Fine Photographs, New Orleans, LA; Joel Soroka Gallery, Aspen, CO; Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, ID; Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX; and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, IL. His work is in numerous private and public collections notably Graham Nash Collection, University of Chicago and the Cherye R. and James F. Pierce Collection. He collaborates with his photographer wife Penrhyn, under the name of PenRod They have their studio in Bridgeport. See PenRod’s website .