Photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon, who tirelessly skilled her lens on the social inequalities, painful struggles, and human resilience to which she bore witness all over the world, died early Monday morning, June 30, on the age of 95. The information of her demise was introduced by Stephen Bulger Gallery, which has exhibited her work since 2007.
All through an almost six-decade observe that started in mid-adulthood and prolonged till her closing years, Fox Solomon used black-and-white images to heart the lived experiences of people whose tales had been usually sidelined or solely excluded from the mainstream. Her unflinching gaze, which garnered each criticism and reward, confronted a few of the most momentous (and infrequently painful) chapters in international human historical past, together with the AIDS epidemic in the USA; late-apartheid South Africa; the Troubles in Belfast; and nuclear destruction in Hiroshima.
Born in 1930 to a secular Jewish household, Fox Solomon grew up in Highland Park, Illinois. After receiving a Bachelor’s diploma from Goucher Faculty in Maryland, she married Joel “Jay” Solomon in 1953 and moved to his hometown of Chattanooga, the place they raised their two kids, Joel and Linda. Upon taking on residence in Tennessee, she developed a eager consciousness of the racial discrimination rampant throughout the Jim Crow-era American South (together with within the segregated movie theaters owned by her husband’s family) and balanced her caretaking duties with political volunteering and native activism.
At 38 years previous, Fox Solomon started taking photographs “by accident” whereas on a cultural alternate journey to Japan. Within the aftermath of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, she turned to the medium as each a way of self-expression and a solution to chronicle unjust realities.
“I made these pictures with an curiosity in portraying each the wonder and unhappiness that I noticed round me,” Fox Solomon stated about her early work documenting the South, later compiled within the ebook Liberty Theater (2018), named after the one Chattanooga cinema open to individuals of shade within the ’60s. “Although many had been taken across the mid-Twentieth century, others got here later. I’m dismayed that in some methods they resonate at this time.”
Her skilled profession, nonetheless, blossomed after she started learning privately beneath photographer Lisette Mannequin, who additionally mentored Diane Arbus and Larry Fink. In 1979, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed her to {photograph} topics in Guatemala, Peru, India, and South Africa, culminating in quite a few exhibitions, together with a solo present on the Museum of Trendy Artwork in 1986, Rosalind Fox Solomon: Ritual.
One in every of her most well-known collection, Portraits within the Time of AIDS from the Nineteen Eighties, concerned photographing people residing with HIV/AIDS on the peak of the epidemic. When the pictures had been first proven at New York College’s Gray Gallery of Artwork in 1988, they had been seen by some as mandatory paperwork of an pressing actuality; nonetheless, others criticized them as exploitative at a time when political activist groups like ACT UP had been campaigning to problem fearmongering and shift the notion of the illness.
Later in life, Fox Solomon turned the digital camera on herself with the roughly chronological series A Woman I Once Knew (2024), which grappled with the expertise of getting old by way of largely nude self-portraits taken from mid-life by way of her latter many years.
The recipient of quite a few accolades, together with the 2019 Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Worldwide Heart of Pictures, Fox Solomon remained an lively artist nicely into her nineties.
One in every of Fox Solomon’s early collectors and a longtime buddy, Richard Grosbard, described her as a “meticulous” photographer and printer with a “fierce eye.”
“She stayed true to black-and-white, even when shade [photography] was turning into in vogue. She caught together with her imaginative and prescient,” Grosbard instructed Hyperallergic.
“She didn’t consider herself as a photographer; she considered herself as an artist.”
