Josh S. Rose: A Collaborator of Curiosity

Lenio Kaklea, The Birds. Performance documentation from The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), November 2025. Performers L to R: Louis Nam Le Van Ho and Dimitri Mitilinaios. Image by Josh Rose courtesy of MOCA

By VICTOR SLEDGE December 14, 2025

“When one of my daughter’s friends comes over, they say the word ‘pretend’ constantly,” multi-hyphenate artist Josh S. Rose explains to me. “What they’re doing is so intimate. There’s no ‘I’m in charge.’ But if you walk up as a parent, they stop because it’s so personal. When I’m with a dancer, it’s exactly like that.”

Rose is a writer, painter, photographer and more. But most importantly, he’s a voracious and insatiable student of art. Through an ongoing exploration of the great Romantic artists, he’s built a practice out of the same intimate, creatively generous and egoless exchanges he’s seen his daughter have with her friends. 

With his photography in particular, Rose has built those types of relationships with dancers. He remembers discovering this collaborative practice after a friend recommended that he connect with a dancer for a project he was working on that relied heavily on bodily communication. Rose says, “I just happened to fall in with someone who was incredibly adept at walking into an environment and expressing themselves somatically.” From there, he’s crafted an art form out of capturing another art form, and he describes it as “technical romanticism.”

Sunsets in Oil. Los Angeles, 2023

“I have this extreme love affair with the camera and photography. So it gets technical because I’m making very distinct choices. But what I’m doing, conceptually, is romantic,” he says.

Rose strikes a balance between a dancer’s performance, where emotion and expression are palpable, and the precise technicality it takes behind the camera to capture that performance in the most masterful way possible. And somewhere in that process, what floats to the top is the story behind it all.

Rose’s work only captures a single, wholly unique moment in a choreographed piece. But the composition, the tension in the dancer’s body, the weight of tone in a photo—that moment always tells a larger story through the small but vociferous details of Rose’s approach. 

It also works against a stigma around dance photography that has persisted for years. Critics have bashed the idea of dance photography because they don’t believe it to be a full enough way to capture the significance of choreography. 

The difference in Rose’s approach is that he isn’t trying to catch a snapshot of a performance. He’s creating something completely new. He takes what a dancer brings to a piece, combines it with his own creative approach and technical finesse – all to produce work that boasts its own creative merit.  

In that way, Rose’s approach is nothing if not full. In fact, that’s what sets him apart from many of his peers.

The Passenger. With Marco Palomino and De Lisa. Los Angeles, July 2023

“I have always been drawn to the reportage style of photography. So I’ve always shot wider,” he says. “When you bring a wider lens to an environment, you see everything. The environment is naturally coming into the frame, and we react to it.”

Rose’s work, by nature, happens in medias res—in the middle of things. Maybe it’s the start of the choreography. Maybe it’s the end or somewhere in between. Whatever it is, it offers a moment in time for people to take in and respond to. When you see that in relation to the environment surrounding the piece, every element begins to beg another question from the viewer.“It allows us to have conversations that are bigger. Where are we? What are we doing? What are we trying to convey,” he says.

Rose’s work invites his audience to a sense of wonder that elevates the storytelling already present in dance. Since the first dancer he worked with, Rose has been happy to open himself up to the raw expression of a dancer’s movement. He says, “I’m entirely in awe of how people express themselves somatically. As a photographer, that offers such a toolbox of emotional states and expression that you have at your disposal.”

The emotion is almost personified through a dancer’s performance, and Rose seems to feed off of that. “I like to absorb it and try to respond like a poet would,” he says. 

We know that body language can often communicate more than words. In Rose’s work, it conspires with his execution of timing, angles, lens choice and more of Rose’s technique to achieve photographs that allow a dancer to speak through their body. Every aspect of Rose’s practice is carefully arranged to allow for a dancer’s voice, in whatever form it may come, to be heard. And that doesn’t mean that Rose’s voice is silenced in the mix. It’s simply blended. He says, “It's not hierarchical. There are no losers. You are creating something together through a shared vocabulary.”

Loyola Marymount Fall Performance Stills, Los Angeles, Nov 2025

Rose finds this vocabulary between himself and the people he works with, paving a path that gives way for everyone to be heard in what becomes not just a dance or photo singularly, but something compounded and novel. “When they’re colliding, something completely new gets created. The photography is what happens when those two things come together,” he says. 

This gracious way of creating speaks to who Rose is as an artist: an ever-curious, hypersensitive creative constantly bouncing off of the world around him and allowing his collaborators to do the same. “When I approach anything, I’m driven by curiosity,” he explains. 

He may not always know everything about a dancer’s world or the studied nuances they bring to a piece. And that dancer may also be unaware of the specific and intentional ways he works with a camera to produce an image. But what matters is that they both are open enough to each other’s creativity to have faith that the unfamiliar or unsure will result in something beautiful. 

And from there, Rose works with the dancer to make sure the essence and emotion of their work blooms in harmony with Rose’s lens. He says, “I’m discovering that there’s this trust that people have with me to capture them.”

At this point in his tenure as an artist, Rose has developed a mutuality with the dance and performing arts community. He’s trusted as someone who’s willing to roll their sleeves up in the sandbox and get back to a pure desire to create on a high level and do so with others who do the same. Again, it goes back to a child-like sense of freedom in creation he’s seen in his daughter’s playdates. One that’s grounded in a trusting exchange of craft that goes deeper than just a photograph or a dance alone.

“There is an incredible thing that happens with dancers when you build rapport. It has to do with going beyond form and honoring what goes on inside a dancer,” he explains. “Those are the kind of things you’re doing in the sandbox with each other.”

Tired. Los Angeles, 2023

Now, that work has led him to work with huge talents and entities in the art world at large. Most recently, he has a collaboration on the way with the Lincoln Center of Performing Arts. While the details of the collaboration are still under wraps, what can be shared is that it’s another milestone in Rose’s career that speaks to the multidisciplinary nature of his work that has continuously proven to take in and respond to the communities and people he exists with. And he’ll do it with the same artistic integrity and curiosity that’s produced the profound work he’s done with the dance community.

And for Rose, that’s his charge as he continues to grow as a premiere talent in this niche of photography. “The responsibility is in staying true to the art form and the principles behind it. I believe in this idea that what we do together in these two disciplines is meant to relay something bigger.” 

If you want to learn more about Rose and keep up with upcoming news about his upcoming collaboration with the Lincoln Center of Performing Arts, you can visit his website at https://www.joshsrose.com/.