Rochelle Costi’s work is inspired by observations of the simple things in everyday life. She takes an ethnographic approach to her investigation of culture, exploring domestic expression as an index of contemporary lives and customs. In her recent series, Rooms--Sío Paulo (1998), Costi invites the viewer to scrutinize, in exhaustive detail, a specific human universe--that is, bedrooms she photographed in and around Sío Paulo, the largest city in Brazil. Costi began working with photography at an early age and has studied architecture, communications, and advertising. Her work is a playful, though sincere record of both habits and rituals, beautiful and socially relevant, elegant and meaningful.

Although not exactly documentary, her Rooms photographs present domestic settings with a minimum of aesthetic or political commentary. Taken together, the series offers something of a t