JEFFREY SCOTT ROVNER

MEDIUM

Photography

ARTIST STATEMENT

Jeff Rovner is a fine art photographer specializing in conceptual art. Through his photographs, he seeks to reveal order, beauty, and meaning in our chaotic world.

ARTIST BIO

Jeff was born in Washington, DC, in 1957. He earned his law degree from George Washington University in 1982. He spent his career as a corporate attorney, technologist, and university professor. His artistic passion is photography. His instructors have included photographers from the Magnum Photo Agency, National Geographic, and the Leica Akademie. Some of Jeff’s photographs are showcased in his book The Values of Le Petit Cirque (2016), which includes a foreword by the co-founder of Cirque du Soleil.

In 2019, the United Nations invited Jeff to exhibit three photographs from his Artificial Intelligence portfolio in Geneva during the UN’s “AI for Good” Conference. His work is held by dozens of corporate and private collectors across the nation.

He is a Board member and art exhibitor at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts, a juried, annual two-month art show and performance venue that attracts more than 200,000 visitors each summer. He has exhibited his art at the Festival since 2017, and will return in summer 2024 to exhibit his Patent portfolio.

Jeff describes the portfolio as follows: “Our modern world is powered by old ideas. In this series of conceptual photographs, I reveal the old ideas that underlie several contemporary technologies. The technologies represented in the photographs range from the serious (e.g., aeronautics and computers) to the fanciful (e.g., magic tricks and ice cream trucks), but all were conceived more than 100 years ago. The plexiglass pane protecting each photograph is laser-etched with an excerpt from the patent application that first described the idea.”

Jeff shares a home in Laguna Beach with his wife and their immense and unusually demonstrative cat.