Photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon, who tirelessly skilled her lens on the social inequalities, painful struggles, and human resilience to which she bore witness world wide, died early Monday morning, June 30, on the age of 95. The information of her dying was introduced by Stephen Bulger Gallery, which has exhibited her work since 2007.
All through a virtually six-decade apply that started in mid-adulthood and prolonged till her last years, Fox Solomon used black-and-white pictures to middle the lived experiences of people whose tales had been typically sidelined or totally excluded from the mainstream. Her unflinching gaze, which garnered each criticism and reward, confronted a number of the most momentous (and sometimes painful) chapters in world human historical past, together with the AIDS epidemic in america; 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 film theaters owned by her husband’s household) and balanced her caretaking duties with political volunteering and native activism.
At 38 years outdated, Fox Solomon started taking photographs “by chance” whereas on a cultural change journey to Japan.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 method of self-expression and a option to chronicle unjust realities.
“I made these images with an curiosity in portraying each the wonder and disappointment that I noticed round me,” Fox Solomon mentioned about her early work documenting the South, later compiled within the e-book Liberty Theater (2018), named after the one Chattanooga cinema open to individuals of coloration 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 as we speak.”
Her skilled profession, nevertheless, blossomed after she started learning privately below 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.
Considered one of her most well-known sequence, Portraits within the Time of AIDS from the Eighties, concerned photographing people residing with HIV/AIDS on the peak of the epidemic. When the photographs had been first proven at New York College’s Gray Gallery of Artwork in 1988, they had been seen by some as vital paperwork of an pressing actuality; nevertheless, others criticized them as exploitative at a time when political activist teams 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 sequence A Girl I As soon as Knew (2024), which grappled with the expertise of growing older via principally nude self-portraits taken from mid-life via her latter a long time.
The recipient of quite a few accolades, together with the 2019 Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Worldwide Middle of Pictures, Fox Solomon remained an lively artist properly into her nineties.
Considered one of Fox Solomon’s early collectors and a longtime pal, Richard Grosbard, described her as a “meticulous” photographer and printer with a “fierce eye.”
“She stayed true to black-and-white, even when coloration [photography] was changing 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.”
