Trained in art history and sculpture, Heinrich Rosenberg lived and worked as a sculptor during the 1920s in Berlin, creating figurative artworks in terracotta, wood and bronze. He was well networked within the artistic expressionist scene in Berlin, as well as within the Jewish community. According to Wolfgang Vollmer, his sculptures were photographed by Abraham Pisarek, who may have helped Rosenberg train himself as a photographer of his own art works (Roth 2021). Especially in the still-life photography of sculptures, technical handling and light conditions were important. It was towards this work and this medium that Heinrich Rosenberg oriented himself after his emigration to London in 1934. Other photographers who had their first exil stop in London before emigration to New York were Trude Fleischmann, Ellen Auerbach, Tim Gidal. Furthermore, there were a dense German émigré photo scene in London, where for example the magazine Picture Post by Stefan Lorant was created or also the photographers Wolf Suschitzky, Lázsló Moholy-Nagy, Gerty Simon as well as Edith Tudor-Hart worked.

As the London art world was not interested in his expressionist sculptors, the search for a new artistic activity led him towards photography and illustration. Working from his kitchen table, he produced highly technical black and white photographs of fruit and vegetable sculptures, in creative and imaginative compositions. These humorous anthropomorphised photographs attracted the interest of a number of magazines and his first children's book, Tommy Apple and his Adventures in Banana-Land, was published in 1935. It was at this point that he and his wife renamed themselves Henry and Lotte Rox. Following the success of his first book, the second book Tommy Apple and Peggy Pear appeared in 1936.

Henry Rox continued to create and photograph fruit and vegetable sculptures after his emigration to New York in 1938. Before moving to South Hadely, where he worked as a teacher and professor of sculpture at Mount Holyke College, he and his wife Lotte lived between 1938 and 1940 in New York. Unfortunately, it is not known where exactly they lived. In 1940 his photographs featured in the children’s book Banana Circus, written by the German publisher and art critic Margaret Fisher, who emigrated to London in 1934. It can be assumed that Rox had met Fisher while he was living in London and had maintained this contact after his emigration to New York. Through Fisher the book was also published in a second edition in London. The book was published by G. P. Putnam's and Sons, which was located in Midtown Manhattan. Also the publishing house The John Denver Company, where Elizabeth Coleman's photobook Chinatown U.S.A. was published, was located in the same building. Other émigré photographers working in children's books were the animal photographersLilo Hess and Ylla as well as Tim Gidal. Furthermore, there were other émigré photographers who published photobooks in New York as Fred Stein with 5th Avenue, Elizabeth Coleman with Chinatown U.S.A., Andreas Feininger, Rolf Tietgens as well as Alexey Brodovitch.

In Banana Circus the story of a gala performance is charmingly written by Margaret Fisher, while Henry Rox created the humorous photo sculptures of bananas. As in Tommy Apple, Rox's black and white photographs of anthropomorphised fruit create an amusing narrative. Rox created a variety of characters, like the Banana weightlifter, for example, who lifts a weight made of orange slices, and Bim the fakir, who performs tricks with his fruit knife stuck in his body. In 1944 a reportage in the Detroit Free Press featured the work of Henry Rox and showed how he created his fruit and vegetable sculptures by modelling them in clay (Anonymous 1944).

Over the following years, Henry Rox began photographing with Kodachrome colour film, giving his sculptures a more vivid character. Some of these colour photographs were used in advertisements, for example by Macy’s department store, for which the émigré photographer Ruth Bernhard also worked. Henry Rox's photo sculptures were also printed on postcards and in advertisements for Vitatoni in Europe, which can still be found in vintage bookstores and online shops. Interestingly, Rox's postcards were much more popular in Europe than America (Roth 2021). Furthermore, his work was represented in a number of American magazines, for example in Life magazine's ”Speaking of pictures” column, in 1939, 1940 and 1941 (Anonymous 1940; Anonymous 1941). For the Hollywood musical Strike up the Band (1940), starring Judy Garland and Mike Rooney, he produced a five-minute animated sequence of an orchestra composed of fruit.

Henry Rox is a forgotten artist from the middle of the 20th century. The few documents, photographs and references to Henry Rox`s work are scattered among many archives and collections in America and Europe and a comprehensive and detailed classification of his work has not been published. Nevertheless, Rox's photographs and image series have been the subject of one project. In 2021 Wolfgang Vollmer revived his still-life fruit iconography and compiled it into a book as well as an exhibition at the Fotohof museum in Salzburg. Vollmer's book succeeds in somewhat redressing the balance with his rediscovery of this impressive artist (Vollmer 2021).