Phil Roeder came to photography late in life and, thanks to a combination of good fortune and dumb luck, his work has been exhibited around the country and published around the world.
Phil’s work has appeared in publications such as National Geographic Traveler, the New York Times, Time, Ad Age, Vice, Mother Jones, NPR, Wired, Forbes, Vice, Berliner Zeitung, Le Monde, Roll Call, US News and World Report, and other news outlets. His photos have been included in exhibits at the Aperture Foundation and the International Center of Photography. He has several photographs available for licensing through Getty Images. In 2023 a photo of his was included in the artist Shepard Fairey’s book “Weathered” and in 2024 one of Phil’s photographs was featured on a postage stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service.
Phil has worked for more than 30 years in public relations and communications, primarily in and around the public sector. Today he is the director of communications for Des Moines Public Schools. He earned his BFA in photography from Arizona State University and is completing an MA in photography from Falmouth University.
See more of Phil’s work at www.philroederphotography.com
83 MILLION MINUTES
Long Shed (from the series 83 Million Minutes), 2024
Inkjet Giclée print, mounted on board, 61 x 41cm
Wading Pool (from the series 83 Million Minutes), 2024
Inkjet Giclée print, mounted on board, 61 x 41cm
Windrow (from the series 83 Million Minutes), 2024
Inkjet Giclée print, mounted on board, 61 x 41cm
A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imaging its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.
The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bacheloard
Vilém Flusser writes: “Images are significant surfaces. Images signify – mainly – something ‘out there’ in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions (as reductions of the four dimensions of space and time to the two surface dimensions).” If every photograph contains elements of time and space, can more of both be condensed into the parameters of a single frame?
The work in this portfolio represents an attempt: each image is an accumulation of 100 photos – taken in short succession and then layered one on top of the other at 1% opacity – to create a singleframe movie, in a way, sharing a minute or two out of the more than 83 million minutes an Iowa farmhouse has stood its ground.
This farmhouse has been in my wife’s family for 155 years. It is a literal and metaphorical foundation for six generations. Tens of thousands of days, one after another, farming the surrounding fields. Waking up on Christmas mornings nowhere but here. Grandchildren on summer breaks playing games and catching fireflies and climbing hay bales.
My wife and I now own this old stone farmhouse along with a few outbuildings and eight acres of land. Room by room we are restoring it for weekend getaways and family retreats, a place for our own grandchildren to one day wake up on Christmas mornings and catch fireflies on summer nights.
