Ann Marie Rousseau’s exhibit, The Fragile Borders of Identity, is another in this season’s series of experiments in combining the graphic with the photographic. Less glitzy than some, it is also more coherent than many, in part because Ms. Rousseau has spent time working out a vocabulary for combining the mark of the hand with the photographic image.

Her technique seems to come more from drawing than from painting- many of the images, in fact, are monochromatic. As a photographer, she works directorially, making formal portraits and staged tableaux that are then enlarged (up to 40 inches by 60 inches) and reworked with paint, ink and other media.

At her best, she makes her pictures palpitate kinetically; figures and settings in uneasy dramas dissolve into and/or radiate flickering force fields that she adds manually to the prints. She slips into pre-Raphaelite pictorialism too easily, but when she pursues her particular demon- male- female relationships- she has all the earmarks of someone who is on to something.

 A.D. Coleman
The New York Observer
December 5, 1988