Homage to Edmund White, 2025 by Roberta Fineberg (RF) is a photographic collage inspired by the life and legacy of American writer and activist Edmund White. RF documents creatively images of books from the author’s private library—stacked, scattered, and densely accumulated—to create a portrait of the writer and his literary world.
Rather than depicting the author or his works directly, RF evokes White through the books on his bookshelves: books that the author has read in his lifetime and which influenced EW’s own works. Additionally among the stacks of books is a black-and-white photo (in the fourth quadrant) a portrait of a female painter friend, Marilyn Schaefer, who had an early and profound influence on EW’s writing. (Marie, a character in White's A Beautiful Room is Empty, 1988, is based on Marilyn Schaefer.)
The serendipitous arrangement of books creates a visual rhythm, with positive and negative spaces, order and disorder, transforming the stacks of books into an abstract landscape.
Photography printed on Hahnemühle paper, the collage's cross-processed images of individual books reveal an expansive cultural life of a man, author and a personal library.
Homage to Edmund White is both tribute and meditation on the relationships between writers, books, and their readers who carry the works and words forward.
Homage to Edmund White, 2025
by Roberta Fineberg
Mixed media: photography collage on Hahnemühle paper
Signed, dated, and titled (on recto)
24 x 35in
Ed of 1
Provenance: RF Studio
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Artist's Bio:
Roberta Fineberg (RF) is a New York-based visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores serendipity, experimentation, and the evolution of ideas through color, material, and process. Working across photography, drawing, installation, video, and abstraction, she investigates themes of impermanence, play, memory, and transformation. Embracing chance as an essential creative force, her work invites viewers to reconsider the relationships between observation, experience, and the physical world.
Fineberg’s exhibitions include Women of Spirit at Zurcher Gallery, New York (2025); Gallery128, New York (2025); Collecting: An Art Fair at Westbeth Gallery, New York (2024); Sojourner Gallery, New York (2022); Phyllis Harriman Gallery (2020, 2022); CADAF Online Art Fair (2020); Gallery122, New York (2018); Curate NY (2013); and Photos, Femmes, Féminisme at Paris Photo (2010). Her work is held in public and private collections, including portraits of women writers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand in Paris. In 2022, her photograph Double Helix was featured in Sotheby’s Contemporary Discoveries preview exhibition in New York.
Recent commissions include twenty pigment prints from her Roman God(dess) series for the Orient Express Hotel in Rome (2025). Her work Union, from the Butterfly Series, was selected for Butterfly: Exploring the World of Lepidoptera (Phaidon, 2025), and in 2026 three works from the series were released as curated digital editions on Sedition.
RF began her career in Paris in the 1980s as an editorial photographer and freelance writer. Her photographs have appeared in international publications including Le Monde, Paris Match, Ms., Jeune Afrique, among others. She is also the author of City Riders: A Story of Riding and Friendship (Howell/Macmillan, 1997).