Tyler Roste (b.1990, Kansas City, MO) is a photographer from Kansas. Roste received a Bachelor of Fine Arts for Photo-Media studies from the University of Kansas in 2013. Roste’s work has been published online in publications such as Aint-Bad and FotoRoom. He has recently had work in numerous group shows including “No Nudes, No Sunsets” in Catskill, NY and “Summer Sun Day Dream” in Pittsburgh, PA at the SilverEye lab. Since finishing undergrad, he has been living and working in New York City where he continues to photograph in the Northeastern regions of the United States including Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York State.
Men of Men
Men of Men is about man’s corrosive connection to the past; how we are tied to the history of the land and intertwined with it; how we continue to struggle in the same lands, on the same ground as those who came before us. We come up from the mud of the land and drag the sins of the past out with us. The small Northern Delaware River communities where these photographs were made are some of the oldest in the United States. However, due to economic and industrial change, the region’s population has been in decline for many years. As in much of rural America, industrial work has been disappearing and jobs have become scarcer. There is a richness to the culture that resides here, a trueness to them, something deeply rooted in the souls of the past. A thread tied to the ghost of an older America.
Centuries ago, the Lenni-Lenape tribes (Delaware Indians) had a vast and thriving empire in the regions along the river but were forced out due to European settlers and western expansion. I find great irony in this: we are now the ones that have begun to fade from the land, not because of conquest, but because of economic and cultural change. There is a violent cyclical nature to our history—how can we learn from our missteps? With the river as my guide, I used the landscape as a backdrop to try and find out what was happening in the rural American towns along the river.
To view more of Tyler Roste’s work please visit his website.