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Rosalind Fox Solomon (born 1930) is an American photographer based in New York City.
Life and education[edit]
Solomon was born on 2 April 1930 in Highland Park, Illinois.[1] She graduated from Highland Park High School in 1947. She attended Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science in 1951.
She married Joel W. (Jay) Solomon (1921–1984), with whom she had two children. The marriage ended in divorce.
Solomon sailed to Belgium and France with The Experiment in International Living.
She studied intermittently with Lisette Model from 1971 to 1977.
Before photography[edit]
Later Solomon became the Southern Regional Director of the Experiment in International Living. In this capacity, she visited communities throughout the Southern United States, recruiting families to host international guests and interact with other cultures in a personal way.[2]
In August 1963, Solomon traveled to Washington, D.C. for an interview with the Equal Employment Department of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was then establishing a program for part-time recruiter–consultants in various regions of the United States. Solomon and a group of USAID staff including Roger Wilkins (nephew of Roy Wilkins) joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, during which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Subsequently, in her work for USAID, Solomon traveled to historically black colleges in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee where she spoke to students and faculty about overseas employment opportunities.[citation needed]
Photography[edit]
In 1968 Solomon's volunteer work with the Experiment in International Living brought her to Japan where she stayed with a family near Tokyo.[3] There, at age 38, Solomon began to use an Instamatic camera to communicate her feelings and thoughts. This was the starting point for her photography practice, which also includes prose related to her life experiences.[4]
Upon her return to the United States, Solomon photographed regularly. She purchased a Nikkormat in 1969 and in the garden shed she processed 35 mm black and white film and printed her first pictures. In 1971, she began intermittent studies with Lisette Model during visits to New York City. By 1974 she was using a medium format camera.[5] Dolls, children, and manikins were some of her first subjects, along with portraits and rituals.[6] She works with black and white film exclusively.[3]
In 1975, Solomon began photographing at the Baroness Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She photographed people recovering from operations, wounds, and illness.[7][8]
In early 1977, Solomon photographed William Eggleston, his family and friends in Tennessee and Mississippi.[9] She moved to Washington where she photographed artists and politicians for the series "Outside the White House" in 1977 and 1978.[10][11]
In 1978 and 1979, she also photographed in the Guatemalan Highlands.[12] Her interest in how people cope with adversity, led her to witness a shaman's rites and a funeral and made photographs in Easter processions.[13][14]
In 1980, Solomon began her work in Ancash, Peru where she returned intermittently for over 20 years. She made photographs in cemeteries where damage from the 1970 Ancash earthquake was still apparent. She continued photographing shamans, cemeteries, funerals and other rituals. She also photographed people of a subsistence economy surviving the extremes of life through Catholic, Evangelist, and Indigenous rites.[14]
With a fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, in 1981 Solomon began photographing festival rites in India. She found an expression of female energy and power in the forms of the goddess figures created in the sculptors' communities of Kolkata (Calcutta). In 1982 and 1983, she continued this work. While there, she photographed artists, including the painter, Ganesh Pyne and the filmmaker, Satyagit Ray. She also made portraits of the Dalai Lama and photographed Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.[14]
In 1987 and 1988, Solomon photographed people with AIDS alone, with their families, and with their lovers. The project resulted in the exhibition, Portraits in the Time of AIDS at the Grey Gallery of Art of New York University in 1988.[15]
In 1988, with concerns about the rise of ethnic violence in the world, she made her first trip to Poland. In 2003, she returned to work again in Poland.[16] In 1988 Solomon's interest in race relations and ethnic violence, took her to Northern Ireland, Zimbabwe and South Africa. She continued the project in 1989 and 1990 in Northern Ireland and South Africa. In the 1990s, she visited hospitals in Yugoslavia and rehabilitation centers for victims of mines in Cambodia, and photographed victims of the American/Vietnam War near Hanoi.[17]
Solomon photographed in Israel and the West Bank for five months during 2010 and 2011, part of This Place.[18] She made portraits of people in Israel and the West Bank. She was photographing Palestinians in Jenin, and happened to be only a few minutes away when Israeli–Palestinian actor and director of The Freedom Theatre, Juliano Mer-Khamis, was gunned down in April 2011.[19][20]
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Rosalind Solomon’s
Singular Journey
We strongly suggest viewing this show in “Full Screen” mode.
Rosalind Solomon may be one of the most interesting photographers you’ve never heard of.
Hers is a bold, humanistic and highly personal view of the world, deftly executed in square format using black-and-white film. Through images like “Catalín Valentine’s Lamb, Ancash, Peru, 1981,” Ms. Solomon confronts our pre-existing ideas. She challenges us with a subversion of the Madonna archetype that is simultaneously nurturing and for some, macabre. We glean much about ourselves through our interpretation of the spectacle.
I first discovered her work on the blog Too Much Chocolate. One comment said: “Genius. How is it possible she’s so unknown? Or have I been in a hole somewhere?” This is exactly how I felt after looking at the images culled from Ms. Solomon’s monograph, “Chapalingas” (Steidl, 2003), which was published in conjunction with her retrospective at Photographische Sammlung in Cologne, Germany. It represents 30 years of work and three years of preparation in its conception, formatting and sequencing.
Born in 1930 in Highland Park, Ill., to prosperous but distant parents, Ms. Solomon married a Chattanooga businessman at 24. She volunteered in various roles for the Experiment in International Living, an exchange program, and ultimately traveled to Japan, where she began taking photographs that first showed her the potential of the medium.
The ensuing decades marked a personal photographic odyssey — exploring and discarding the person she had been while discovering who she truly was. This was accomplished through the making of photographs, recordings and connections with other people along the way.
Rosalind Solomon (Courtesy Bruce Silverstein) Her Boyfriend and Her Son, Miami Beach. 1994.“Early on, I had a hard time with people’s responses to my photographs,” she said, recalling an encounter in 1972. “I was in the audience when Alice Walker read her poems at the University of the South. She was a part-time editor at Ms. Magazine then and I asked if I could show her some of my work. She looked at a box of my doll pictures and did not consider publishing a one. Instead she gasped and said, ‘These pictures remind me of the murders of civil rights workers in Mississippi.’
“It took me a while to realize that Alice Walker’s gasp acknowledged the power of the pictures.”
Curatorial response was mixed. John Szarkowski, the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, found her work intriguing. But he encouraged her not to show her work too soon for fear of comparisons to Diane Arbus. A notable magazine publisher said her work appeared to be taken by someone under the influence of drugs (it was the 1970s), and then proceeded to offer her a book project if she could put up $25,000 (raising the question: and who exactly was under the influence?)
“I gradually learned to treasure the power of my work and to value my own voice,” she said. “I accept myself and realize that being an outsider is part of my strength. That’s why you have to ignore these things even when they hurt and stay on your path.”
She studied with Lisette Model during her husband’s business trips to New York. It was Ms. Model who asserted that Ms. Solomon was an artist with a right and need to claim time and space for her work. Ms. Solomon recalled that advice in an interview with the blog 2Point8:
You are an artist. You must be selfish and not give too much time to others. Marriage is a problem for photographers because they need to be free. Your children are almost grown. Your civic work is done. Your husband needs to spend some time alone. You must have the freedom to create your pictures.
Ms. Solomon acknowledges a debt to Arbus, who showed her the virtues of the square format and the use of strobe to capture moments which would otherwise be lost. Both produced bodies of work that focus on humanity and are devoid of nostalgia and cliché. And Ms. Solomon also acknowledges Margaret Mead as an influence, pursuing her subjects with the focus of a global visual anthropologist.
Her images are inscrutable even as they resonate, and thus are open to the viewer’s interpretation. Some are wildly daring. One wonders about this fearless woman, at the age of 50, as a vagabond in Peru during its time of terrorism. Shining Path guerrillas based themselves in places like Ancash, where Ms. Solomon did a great deal of her work.
“When I flew away, I was on my own,” she told me recently. “And that was part of the lure. I left behind my daily life and I landed wherever I landed. The risks that I took led me into the most amazing experiences of my life and gave me freedom to photograph whatever attracted me.”
By 1986 she was divorced and living in New York, as she still does. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship, supporting her work in Brazil and Peru, and had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (“Rosalind Solomon: Ritual“) and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Yet she says of this period: “Sunshine and lollipops it was not. I completely changed my life in my early 50s to live the life of an artist focused totally on my creative work. That was a wrenching time.”
She kept making photographs, some autobiographical films, a few hand-made journals and even two albums. Today her work is held in over 50 collections. While she has succeeded as an artist, however, the institutional recognition that comes with major career retrospectives has thus far eluded her in the United States.
Rosalind Solomon is not sitting around waiting for it to happen. She just finished reading a Junot Diaz novel. She attended the opening night of “The Oath” and then went back the next night for a repeat performance with questions and answers. On May 13, a solo show opened at the Bruce Silverstein gallery in Chelsea. And her work can also be found in “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,” which opened May 7 at MoMa.
“I am not a spring chicken,” she wrote to me, “but Louise Bourgeois is my role model. I choose to continue my journey as an artist. It’s a good and productive life.”
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