Rose

Rose is the first monograph of John Kayser, a Los Angeles photographer whose work stayed private during his lifetime and surfaced only after his death.

The book collects 26 photographs in a 32-page saddle-stitched paperback, published by Ampersand Editions in 2015 in an edition of 300 copies. Kayser made photographs and films in Los Angeles through the 1960s and 70s, using his own house and the surrounding streets as the setting for staged, recurring images built around a single obsession with female beauty. The women who appear in the pictures performed for a practice that Kayser never showed publicly; the work was found among his belongings after he died in 2007.

Ampersand Gallery, in Portland, Oregon, later Hood River, first exhibited the material in the show Rose and Photographs and Films, and it has since traveled to Delmes & Zander in Berlin and Cologne, Galerie Christian Berst in New York, FARAGO in Los Angeles and the Journal Gallery in Brooklyn. Ampersand followed Rose with a second Kayser book, Sitting, drawn from the same body of work.