An Encounter with Photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon

Photo: Rosalind Fox Solomon

This interview with the famed photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon is from October 2021. We’re republishing following Solomon’s loss of life on June 24, 2025. She was once 95.

Rosalind Fox Solomon has nearly by no manner worked on project. When she first started taking photography with an concept of constructing art work, no person would have expected her to turn that into a profession; she was once heading into her 40s with two formative years, a lady discovering out to talk as she hadn’t been ready to earlier to. She started off taking pictures terminate to her house in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Even after she started gaining recognition and touring farther afield, she didn’t exactly have a prolonged-interval of time thought: She would, she says, just make a resolution to high-tail somewhere — infrequently because of the a disruptive event, esteem an earthquake or a flood, but on the total just because, hiring a recordsdata and a translator if she mandatory one. In India, Guatemala, Brazil, or Missouri, she’d transfer spherical and hit upon at of us, engaging them but no longer asserting much, and reach attend with photography. That’s it.

Did she mediate about what collectors or publishers or editors would perhaps additionally prefer, the manner so many photographers enact? “First of all, I’ve by no manner been commercially viable,” Fox Solomon says now. “I by no manner thought about that. Truly, I just worked. Piled up my prints, 365 days after 365 days.”

We’re talking in Washington Sq. on a supreme October day, about a blocks from the constructing the put Fox Solomon has lived since 1984, when she was once 54 years archaic and no longer too prolonged ago divorced. She’s 91 now and hasn’t stopped working, spending the bulk of her time this display day gathering and bettering her older work for e-newsletter. In 2021, MACK revealed The Forgotten, her decision of 40 years’ worth of portraits; then a solo display opened at Foley Gallery, incorporating many of the same photography. Fox Solomon is no longer a mission-assertion roughly artist — “I don’t have a relationship to about a of the failings I’m pointing to in The Forgotten,” she tells me as we start paging via the guide — but a mission of styles looks to unspool anyway. Fox Solomon made these photography nearly in each place on the globe the put of us were trodden down for the interval of her lifetime, infrequently by pure forces, but namely by imperial The USA.

Unlit-and-white portraits from all these areas — and Havana, rural Peru, Phnom Penh, and plenty others — salvage the guide. (As enact some from Washington Sq., including one spy of of us on a bench same to the one we’re sitting on.) Of a photograph made in Istanbul, Fox Solomon says: “Here’s a marriage on a ship on the Bosphorus. I was once astounded. Here’s a abdomen dancer. And he’s pushing money onto her face.” In Guatemala in 1992, two of us lie in a roadside ditch as their child watches over them. “Was somebody hit by a car?” I demand. “No,” she replies. “They had been drunk. Oh, what a mess. And the kid would need to sit down down down there except they slept it off because they weren’t reach house.” A Unlit couple in Chattanooga, the girl showing a sportive sly smile: “She was once a janitor in the metropolis hall. She knew the total thing about your total politicians.”

It’s subtle to slot Fox Solomon’s work into a photographic niche. Her social judgment of appropriate and wrong isn’t on the total entrance and center the manner it’s in, issue, Gordon Parks’s sage photography of the segregated South, the put an trusty neon signal tells you what’s horribly unfriendly. The extra obtrusive and in all likelihood glib comparability is to Diane Arbus, and there are about a similarities: the centered faces, the 2-and-a-quarter-lumber-sq. film layout. Nonetheless Arbus’s photography are famed for their relentlessness; Fox Solomon’s are extra generous, even when she’s taking pictures questionable of us and areas. They’re about who the subject issues mediate they are as much as who we look for them as. The psychological layering is conflicted and oblique. “The depth is in the photos, no longer what I issue about them,” Fox Solomon says. “They symbolize many strands of emotion and join to realities — sociological, ancient, and political — and I’m drawn to the interior as neatly because the outer.”

Istanbul, 1994.
Photo: Rosalind Fox Solomon, from ‘The Forgotten’ (MACK 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

To listen to her listing it, the digicam was once the contrivance with which she also stumbled on herself, and it came about a runt bit by likelihood. Rosalind Fox grew up in a nice suburb of Chicago; her father had done neatly in the wholesale-tobacco-and-candy alternate, and her extremely dependent mother hoped for her daughter to develop into, as Rosalind says now, “a comely girl.” Her sister, in conversation with one other member of the family, explained the scenario in a while: “Rosalind was once no longer esteem us. She was once entirely diversified, and we by no manner understood her.” It was once a neatly-off house with a fleshy-time stay-in maid but (going by the bits of biography in a earlier guide, Got to Proceed) no longer a comfortable one: Her father was once unfaithful, her mother once tried to abolish herself.

After college, she says, “I wasn’t that confident, and I was once … kinda misplaced. I was once misplaced.” She received a pair of jobs and traveled with the Experiment in Global Living, the summer season-abroad organizers. At 23, she married a neatly-off, politically linked Southerner who at final turned a trusty-estate developer, Joel “Jay” Solomon, and moved to Chattanooga. It was once 1953. “He was once an correct man,” she says, but “I desired to defend working, because I loved working. And my husband said, ‘No wife of mine is ever going to work.’ I’m no longer kidding you.” They’d two formative years, and Fox Solomon at final occupied herself the manner Chattanooga housewives with a social judgment of appropriate and wrong did, volunteering with liberal causes — the League of Ladies Voters, civil-rights groups — in between giving dinners for her husband’s boring alternate associates. “So I was once doing one thing that I desired to enact, but I was once also residing an better-center-class existence, ?” She took guitar lessons to are attempting to shake off the ennui, and rode horseback each week.

Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1978.
Photo: Rosalind Fox Solomon, from ‘The Forgotten’ (MACK 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK./Rosalind Fox Solomon

In 1968, one thing snapped in her. After the King and Kennedy assassinations, she gave up her activist work, unlucky. She’d been working as an equal-different recruiter for a neighborhood called the Company for Global Development but chucked the gig when she realized that quite a lot of the roles she was once filling had been in Vietnam, effectively propping up the struggle. “I turned inward,” she says. She also started taking photography, first with a digicam she sold for a cultural-alternate day out to Japan. Groping to explicit herself and unable to focus on Jap, she stumbled on that she could perhaps elevate via the digicam some of what she was once discovering it subtle to articulate: “It allowed me to put in the forefront substances of myself that I had no longer but realized — that had no longer but been in my consciousness.” Within the early ’70s, she started going to an Alabama flea market to develop aloof lifes of broken dolls, a creative breakthrough of styles. Gradually she migrated from the dolls to portraits of the sellers and their customers. In an are attempting to slot in when she visited, she tied on a frilly jog bonnet. (“Clearly they knew I wasn’t a farmer,” she says now.)

Though Fox Solomon wasn’t responsive to it, she was once discovering this medium exactly as it was once coming into its enjoy. Photographers had been thought to be artists earlier to, of course — Stieglitz and Steichen, Margaret Bourke-White, Lisette Mannequin and her contemporaries — and MoMA had started a photography department a generation earlier in 1940. Nonetheless the compose was once aloof a chunk deprecated by much of the art work Institution, who thought of photographers as technicians bigger than conveyors of thought and depth. There were few collectors of photographic prints and supreme a pair of severe dealers, and it’s good to likely aquire exceptional work for pennies. Arbus’s sensational, troubling photography — and her rising public image after her 1971 suicide — had been amongst the forces starting up to fall down that wall. Fox Solomon says she knew of supreme two photographers by title when she started making photography: Diane Arbus and Ansel Adams.

Calhoun, Georgia, 1976.
Photo: Rosalind Fox Solomon, from ‘The Forgotten’ (MACK 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK./Rosalind Fox Solomon

In these years, she would accompany her husband when he came to New York on alternate, and whereas she was once right here she would accept her work printed by Modernage, thought to be one of the most metropolis’s nice processing labs. Within the early ’70s, she met a lady at the lab’s Christmas occasion who at final led her to Mannequin, the gargantuan mid-century photographer who had taught Arbus some two an extended time earlier and who was once renowned for her incisive portraits of fashioned of us in fashioned settings in France and New York. Mannequin told her to “bring the total thing you’ve ever done.” Fox Solomon showed up with suitcases fleshy of prints, and the older photographer “checked out my things for six hours. At nighttime, we had been both exhausted, and she said, ‘Yes, I will hold you on.’”

She had lessons with Mannequin a pair of times a 365 days on these trips to New York. (Her formative years had been young of us by this time.) The work was once anxious, and no longer simply because Mannequin was once a drill sergeant. There were widespread classes in lighting and a field day out to the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, the put they had been “having a hit upon no longer supreme at the very best objects but also things esteem the fire extinguishers or an outlet for warmth or one thing — noticing the total thing.” Mannequin ordered Fox Solomon spherical as she worked: Pause it from under. Pause it from the facet. You are going to also’t just stand in the same situation — accept lower. “The object I primarily didn’t esteem about the teachings, I later realized was once primarily appropriate: She would repeatedly focus on herself for a half an hour earlier to she would hit upon at the the rest of mine,” says Fox Solomon. “What was once going on with her work and who she loved and who she didn’t, the photographers who had been renowned that she thought had been shit. And I was once going loopy, , because I needed her to hit upon at my things — but in the dwell, I realized plenty.”

On the starting up, Fox Solomon shot 35-millimeter film, but soon she shifted to two-and-a-quarter-lumber sunless and white, the sq. layout that frames a face so neatly. In most cases she made appropriate photography for the interval of the realm she’d reach to know: In a single, a blond Tennessee senator, Democrat Jim Sasser, is proven hugging his two formative years whereas his wife’s arm sticks into the frame, cupping one child’s head from above; the family was once clearly going for sportive Kennedyesque roughhousing, however the scene is demanding and the rest but informal, namely under the anxious gentle of Fox Solomon’s strobe.

Nashville, Tennessee, 1976.
Photo: Rosalind Fox Solomon, from ‘The Forgotten’ (MACK 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK./Rosalind Fox Solomon

Johannesburg, South Africa, 1988.
Photo: Rosalind Fox Solomon, from ‘The Forgotten’ (MACK 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK./Rosalind Fox Solomon

One other time, she photographed Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia, earlier to he was once president. “My son kept telling me, ‘Mother, it’s essential be photographing Jimmy Carter.’ I was once photographing broken-up dolls, and I didn’t need to pause — I thought that was once wanted, what I was once doing.” Nonetheless she was once persuaded to turn up one day when Carter was once dredging a pond, and made some unbelievable photography of the born-but again president, standing in the water in his denim shirt. Indubitably one of them is on the jacket of Kai Fowl’s new Carter biography. (Fox Solomon’s husband would later work for the president, as head of the Popular Providers and products Administration.) One other of her books, Liberty Theater, gets into the racial dynamics of the Deep South in the Seventies. The photography suggest that Fox Solomon had immersed herself in the Unlit tradition of the South, because her subject issues don’t seem highly guarded, but she is matter-of-truth about her limits: “I don’t know how much I did it. I mean, my company in Chattanooga had been activists and liberals, and after I mediate about what we primarily did or didn’t enact, it makes me primarily feel very guilty. Your associations are no longer as astronomical as they need to be. On sage of I aloof lived there, ?”

She began to display her work, first in a neighborhood exhibition in Chattanooga. A series she did in Israel, titled “Roses and Radishes,” traveled to lots of American synagogues in 1974. (Presently she calls the photos “tourist recollections,” and and hints that they’re a runt naïve in contrast to her extra fresh work photographing Palestinians.) By 1980, she had a display at the Corcoran Gallery of Artwork in Washington, D.C.; in 1986, she had a solo exhibition at MoMA. On about a events, she ended up training her lens on highly efficient of us but again, on the total on very quick inquire of: in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama (“That was once distinctive: I was once wearing work boots and a kurta and pants, and he said to me, ‘You hit upon esteem a Russian!’”), and in New Delhi, Indira Gandhi (“She came out, and she sat on a chair, and she didn’t issue a phrase”). In most of her photography, on the different hand — namely the work she made after she ended her marriage and moved to New York — she’s having a hit upon into the faces of of us who’re residing somewhere reach the perimeter of the abyss. Arguably her most current body of labor is from New York in the silly Eighties: photography of of us with AIDS, most of them young, most of them men, on the total with the lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma visible on their skin. (They had been proven at the Gray Artwork Gallery, trusty by the put we’re sitting in the park; at the time, the New York Times claimed she was once sensationalizing her subject issues, a criticism that as of late looks thin.)

Chavin, Ancash, Peru, 1995.
Photo: Rosalind Fox Solomon, from ‘The Forgotten’ (MACK 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK./Rosalind Fox Solomon

Cape Town, South Africa, 1990.
Photo: Rosalind Fox Solomon, from ‘The Forgotten’ (MACK 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK./Rosalind Fox Solomon

“I’m repeatedly pondering, Who’s this person? What does this person mediate about and primarily feel?” she says. She attributes her means to filter into these conditions to her hit upon: her photographer’s vest, her fats glasses and widespread loose attire, and (as of late) her white hair. “I don’t intimidate of us — I just hit upon esteem a kooky archaic girl,” she says. I offer, tentatively, that she would perhaps additionally in a device elevate that she’s one thing of an outsider herself, and she looks to agree. “They just didn’t accept me,” she says of her family. “I was once very severe as a child, and I felt very rejected. And I primarily feel that some of my going into unknown environments — meeting of us wherever they had been, even on the boulevard, and being current — partly came from that sense of searching to be current. Which is loopy.” Successfully, the guide is called The Forgotten, so … “Yeah. , I’ve by no manner said it, but I’ve thought about that. How I would high-tail to a rustic as a stranger, and I would at the very least quick primarily feel that I belonged in a single neighborhood or one other.”

Though Fox Solomon has been taking pictures less as of late, she does aloof accept accessible. When MoMA requested her to work on a brand new series from scratch in 2019, she says, “I didn’t listing them I hadn’t had a digicam in my hand for lots of years” and jumped in, taking thought to be one of her very rare commissions. (Indubitably one of the most portraits she made at the museum, of a employee who’s been painting gallery walls and poses alongside with his roller and tray, looks in the brand new guide.) She’s planning to create a brand new body of labor for her next guide, about whose field she is modest. Walking attend from the park, we focus on the recount classes she’s been doing. She does a runt time on a stationary bike, stretches, some diversified low-impression stuff. She’s namely into the Alexander Technique, a space of posture modifications that are said to have an effect on no longer supreme the body however the thoughts. “At the same time as you’re esteem this” — she looks to be at the sidewalk in the center distance — “you don’t primarily feel as appropriate. After which you steal your head esteem this” — she raises her chin and stands taller — “you’re feeling better. You enact.” Her scoot quickens as she heads for house.

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