Rebecca Conroy spent her adolescence studying sketching, sculpture, and painting at LaGuardia High School in NYC. She received her B.A. from Hampshire College in Film, and returned to NYC where she worked for years in the fashion industry. She specialized in PR, Home Design, and prop styling for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. She also worked as an assistant for Roman and Williams. Her styling work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, on Smithsonianstore.com, in Hunger Magazine, and in books for Bloomberg Media and Rodale, Inc. Television and film work include Australia's Next Top Model, Sundance feature films, and national advertising campaigns, including Ulta Beauty, Macy’s, and Marie Claire. Rebecca also holds an MFA from Columbia University in Film Producing.
Artist Statement
The new constantly meets the old, and time folds in on itself like a dream in my photographs, blending past and present. The girls I capture, posed in vintage silks, 70’s polyester, prairie printed cottons, and structured wool, exist somewhere between memory and fantasy. An ideal that once was, full of whimsical hope. The girls are both characters and archetypes, almost like paper dolls carefully placed in scenes from another era. They are muses, protagonists of untold stories. Diners, Catskills motels, small, abandoned restaurant lounges, and places that were once frequented daily - neon signs, next to old props, and roadside attractions from bygone days - these spaces each whisper their own stories. They hold the residue of dreams and lives lived before, now temporarily inhabited by girls suspended in time, their expressions both knowing and elusive. Each frame is a vignette, a moment of quiet theater where nostalgia meets an eerie stillness. There is such a beautiful tension when the young meet the old. Drawing from the world of cinema, dreamlike femininity, and quiet surrealism, my work is as much about the environment as it is about the subjects.
My background in art and fashion styling informs each composition - every garment and every detail was chosen not just for aesthetics, but to evoke a feeling, an implied yet mysterious story. These photographs invite you to step into their world, to remember places you've never been, and to sense a story just beyond the edges of the frame. As a first-generation American from a working-class Polish immigrant family, my work reflects upon an idea I felt led to as a child by my relatives, who lived paycheck to paycheck, working in factories, bars, with cement as builders, and as cleaning women; an idea of “American happiness,” often highlighted by whimsical locations that we would pass by on the side of the road, in Chicago. I have captured the same whimsy and nostalgia here in the Hudson Valley, where my daughter and her friends have grown up. Also, the oldies station that plays faithfully in our car has informed the vibration for many of the shoots.