Rosanne Olson

One afternoon in the late 1970s, a young woman paid a visit to Professor Duncan McDonald's office in Allen Hall. She was a medical technician at Sacred Heart Hospital, working mostly with cancer patients, and she was considering a career change.

She told McDonald she wanted to learn more about photography and showed him a slim portfolio. Though it was modest, it struck him. She had an extra-ordinary way of seeing her subjects. He encouraged her to apply to the School's graduate journalism program, and she did.

Today, Rosanne Olson's unusual style has earned her coveted assignments creating images for ad campaigns for Puerto Rico's Department of Tourism and the New York City Ballet. Her images have been selected eight times for the Communication Arts Photography Annual, which exhibits the most innovative work in the field.

"She is an exquisite creator of portraiture, pure and simple," says McDonald. "She literally 'sees' emotion and can sense 'action' in what most would consider still life."

Olson studied both journalism and fine art while she was at the University, a combination that influenced her career. "I had very broad interests," she says. "There's a whole spectrum of photography: art, journalism, advertising. Those things used to be separate, but now they're more blended. My goal has
always been to combine them. I was in love with photography, and I thought it would be great to make a living at it."

Appearing in the 2001 Communication Arts Photo Annual, this is a shot of an eraser dog Olson did for the Bellevue Art Museum's opening. The basis of the shot was finding creativity in everyday life. Photo by Rosanne Olson

McDonald remembers one particularly poignant assignment Olson worked on while she was at the University, a series in which she documented the lives of young cancer patients and their relationships with their oncologists.

Olson also served as a graduate teaching fellow for McDonald's photojournalism courses, running photo labs and teaching technique to undergrad-uates. "She was a terrific instructor," he recalls.

After receiving her master's degree in 1981, Olson worked for five years as a photographer at The Register-Guard, under the guidance of Brian Lanker. "Try to invent something you've never seen before," she remembers Lanker telling her, and that's exactly what she has done in her career. Her images resonate, whether they're displayed on a book cover, in a newspaper ad, or in a gallery.

"She is a grand experimenter," says McDonald. "Her enthusiasm and energy are boundless."

Last December, Photo District News featured a series of photos Olson made using a pinhole camera, a primitive instrument requiring extremely long exposures. The camera records only the slowest of movements, resulting in haunting images of uninhabited cities and silent landscapes. This is precisely what Olson likes about it. "I try to create photographs that get to the core, the kernel, the essence of a subject," she says. The pinhole camera helps her do that. "I love romantic, soft images, and that's what these are."

For the past 16 years, Olson has lived in Seattle, where she continues to produce fine art and advertising photography for corporate clients such as Boeing, Hewlett Packard and Eddie Bauer.