Tales From The Crypt—Matthew Rolston’s ‘Vanitas’ Photo Art Project

October 23, 2025

Forbes 

by Tom Teicholz

 

Tales From The Crypt—Matthew Rolston’s ‘Vanitas’ Photo Art Project

 

Halloween has become America’s most popular secular holiday. It’s the one time of year in which we agree to celebrate the undead, the ghosts and ghouls, vampires, werewolves, and zombies, as well as popular cultural figures, in a festival of all that is morbid. This makes the timing perfect for the debut of Matthew Rolston’s latest personal work: Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, the culmination of a decade-long project of images made in the Capuchin Crypt in Palermo, Italy.

Individual prints on a monumental scale from Rolston’s Vanitas series are currently being exhibited in small groupings at four different locations across Los Angeles: ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena (through November 9, 2025), Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles (through November 8, 2025), The Daido Moriyama Foundation’s ‘Daido Star Space’ in downtown LA and at the Leica Gallery, Los Angeles in West Hollywood (Monday October 27, through Sunday November 2, 2025).

It is fair to say that Matthew Rolston, artist, photographer, music video director, creative director, and teacher, is having what we call a ‘moment’. He recently received a lifetime achievement award from ArtCenter, where he was a student and where he has taught for many years, and where, in 1998, he endowed the Matthew Rolston Scholarship for Film and Creative Direction.

In connection with the award, there was a gala dinner held at ArtCenter during the College’s alumni reunion weekend in which Paul Martineau, curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, presented Matthew with his award. (Martineau included two of Matthew’s images in the recent Getty exhibition, Queer Lens.)

As part of that alumni weekend, Matthew was interviewed on stage by journalist Christina Binkley, and a week later by curator and art critic Rotem Rozental on the subject of his ArtCenter Vanitas exhibition. A triptych from Vanitas is on show there, timed to the release of a gorgeous large format art book, published by Nazraeli Press.

I’ve been aware of Matthew’s work since the start of his career at Andy Warhol’s Interview (where I also got my start, and where I first met him). I was also a good friend of his late brother, Dean Rolston, with whom I was in graduate school.

You can never predict what Matthew will do next. In his professional work, he has always loved to marry contradictions and highlight what he calls ‘the unity of opposites’ – when things are one thing and their opposite at the same time. He calls this cognitive dissonance “the special sauce.” What has always distinguished Matthew’s editorial work, as well as his personal fine art projects, is that although he works in what people believe to be an objective medium – photography – he is, in fact, a conceptual artist.

In Matthew’s portrait work, there has always been a self-aware irony present in how the subjects are styled and posed. For Interview, he often made contemporary black and white portraits using classic Hollywood lighting and staging reminiscent of MGM’s photographer George Hurrell, the studio era’s master of glamour. In his work for Rolling Stone, for whom he shot more than 100 covers, Matthew gave music legends the theatricality of Broadway stars. In his music video and commercial work, there is a certain maximalist tendency, as if the artists are icons – and more than a few were (or are). Or as Matthew himself has said, “My camera is a fabulous liar.”

In Matthew’s artworks, he has set different challenges for himself. In his first fine art project Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits, he photographed ventriloquist dummies collected at the obscure Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell Kentucky. The square format and white backgrounds of the dummies’ spookily realistic portraits challenge us to consider what makes us human. Matthew describes the Vent Haven Portraits this way: “The Talking Heads project became a fine art series of monumentally scaled, forensic looking closeups that explore the sense of life in these inanimate objects and how we project our life force into images of humans.”

For Matthew’s second personal project, Art People: The Pageant Portraits, he photographed volunteer performers in elaborate costume and makeup for The Pageant of The Masters, the long-running summer performance of tableaux vivants in Laguna Beach, California. In this series, Matthew questions: What is art? Who is an artist? And why do we make art? Are the figures in the Pageant Portraits themselves artworks – or do Matthew’s photos make them so?

During his conversation with Christina Binkley at ArtCenter, relating to his move away from commissioned work, Matthew said that the more successful he became in his commercial career and the more money was at stake for the client, the less creative freedom he had. At the same time, social media in all its forms was wresting control of image-making in every sense, from the photographer to the subjects themselves. As an example, Matthew cited Kim Kardashian, who completely controls her image. At the same time, Matthew said, we are all becoming creative directors – of our own brand, and of others’.

His current exhibition, Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits is an art project that has consumed Matthew for more than a decade. The Catacombe dei Cappuccini di Palermo is a cemetery in Sicily, a crypt that has become something of a macabre tourist attraction. The history of the crypt goes back to the 16th Century. When Palermo’s Capuchin monastery outgrew its cemetery, they built a crypt beneath, where in 1599, they mummified one of their order. At first, the crypt was restricted to their friars. However, over time, Palermo’s aristocratic and wealthy residents paid to be mummified there, often in their best clothes. As long as their relatives paid, their corpses were maintained. The legend is that upon the rapture, those in the crypt would be the first to enter heaven. They remained standing in their finery, ready to be risen up. By the 20th Century the crypt stopped taking in corpses and became a tourist attraction.

The crypt has been inspiration to various artists over the years. Among the most notable are painters Otto Dix and Danish Symbolist Laurits Andersen Ring, the photographer/painter Sigmar Polke, and photographers Peter Hujar and Richard Avedon.

The connection to Avedon is significant for Matthew because, as he has told the story, on his first day at ArtCenter, he encountered his hero, Richard Avedon there. Avedon was a visiting artist presenting an exhibition at the College. Just out of his teens at the time, Matthew could not foresee that, like Avedon, he would forsake a commercial career for a late-in-life transition to making art works, that a subject he would work on would be one that also captivated Avedon, and that someday he too would exhibit work at the College.

At this phase of his life and professional career, Matthew has chosen to confront the existential questions of: Where is the end point? What becomes of us after we die? What, if anything, lives on? What is life? What do corpses reveal to us about life? And what do they reveal about death?

What Matthew says about Vanitas is this: “I went searching for the truth in my latest project. In a way, that's what these mummies do for me. They tell me true stories about life, death, and art. Photographing the mummies was strange, yes, but it was also deeply moving. In those faces, I saw both the fragility of life and the persistence of beauty. I discovered the vanity of so many humans and their desire to cheat death or touch immortality. There is no immortality. There's only eternity.”

Matthew’s Palermo Portraits have been printed as unique art works. Not as multiples or editioned – more like paintings. Rather than being exhibited together in one place or in one room, as is traditionally done, Matthew has created ten unique works, a few of which are exhibited in each of four locations: ArtCenter in Pasadena, Fahey/Klein in Los Angeles, Daido Star Space in DTLA, and at Los Angeles’ Leica Gallery.

The limited edition Nazraeli Press monograph of Vanitas: the Palermo Portraits by Matthew Rolston offers 50 four-color plates where one can see the magic Matthew has created in these images.

Matthew photographed the Palermo mummies in their crypt, in a series of night shoots, using theatrical gels of three different wavelengths of light (the images look digitally colorized but that is the lighting), creating a certain colored luminescence. It is beautiful lighting for a gruesome subject.

With the Palermo Portraits, Matthew has created work that recalls Expressionism, referencing artists such as Egon Schiele and James Ensor, and in some works, the disturbing 1953 portrait of Pope Innocent X by the British painter Francis Bacon.

There is an uncanny and eerie way that the Capuchin corpses hover between life and death, seemingly smirking, laughing, as their faces are in the process of crumbling to dust. The figures are contorted in ways reminiscent of an Egon Schiele drawing.

The decision to only show a few of the works in each exhibition venue underscores the power of each image. It is not only that in a photograph of ongoing decay, time has stopped; it is also that the figures (or their families) imagined that they were stopping time through mummification – and finally, that we as viewers are stopping time to take in these difficult images, ones which both attract and repulse. Matthew is fond of comparing this dissonance to going to see a horror movie on a first date. “You are scared. But, in fact, you are safe in a theater. You don’t know each other very well, but in a moment of fright you grab each other’s hand.” Horror and intimacy braided, like decay and beauty in the Palermo Portraits.

The Dummies, the Portrayers, The Mummies, in each of his fine art series what seems to interest Matthew most is not the object or the person, but what we project onto them, and what that tells us. They are all, and each in their own way, conceptual. And with the Palermo Portraits, Matthew challenged himself to confront not just death but the afterlife. Spoiler Alert: We turn to dust.

The Palermo Portraits are a reminder that in the end, as Matthew has said, “we are all going to the same place, but none of us can agree on where that is.” Whatever vanity, whatever wealth, whatever status, whatever belief system, Matthew has shown us all of our futures, and it may be beautiful, but it is not pretty.

Although macabre, the Palermo Portraits are not depressing or meant as a downer. In a play of Rolston-esque cognitive dissonance, the portraits are strangely life affirming. What they tell us is that there is just this one life for each of us to make the most of; that we share more in common with others than what sets us apart; and that what makes us truly alive is neither wealth nor status, nor even where we will be buried. To be alive is to create, to converse, to feel, to react – something those in the Capuchin Crypt can no longer do.

Matthew Rolston will be at the Leica Gallery on Beverly Blvd in West Hollywood on Sunday October 26 at 1PM in conversation with photographer Sando Miller. For more information about Matthew Rolston’s Vanitas, please visit: vanitasproject.com.