All through an almost six-decade observe that started in mid-adulthood and prolonged till her remaining years, Fox Solomon used black-and-white images to heart the lived experiences of people whose tales had been typically sidelined or solely excluded from the mainstream. Her unflinching gaze, which garnered each criticism and reward, confronted a number of the most momentous (and infrequently painful) chapters in world human historical past, together with the AIDS epidemic in the US; late-apartheid South Africa; the Troubles in Belfast; and nuclear destruction in Hiroshima.
“Untitled” (1974) (© 2025 Rosalind Solomon, courtesy Museum of Fashionable Artwork)
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 youngsters, Joel and Linda. Upon taking over 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At 38 years outdated, Fox Solomon started taking images “by accident” whereas on a cultural trade journey to Japan.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 strategy to chronicle unjust realities.
“I made these photographs with an interest in portraying both the beauty and sadness that I saw around me,” Fox Solomon mentioned about her early work documenting the South, later compiled within the guide Liberty Theater (2018), named after the one Chattanooga cinema open to folks of coloration within the ’60s. “Though many were taken around the mid-20th century, others came later. I am dismayed that in some ways they resonate today.”
Left: “Polish Shadow, Warsaw, Poland” (1988); proper: “Captive Bird, Chichicastenango, Guatemala” (1977) (© Rosalind Fox Solomon / MUUS Assortment)
Her skilled profession, nonetheless, blossomed after she started finding out privately underneath 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 Fashionable Artwork in 1986, Rosalind Fox Solomon: Ritual.
Certainly one of her most well-known sequence, Portraits within the Time of AIDS from the Nineteen Eighties, concerned photographing people dwelling 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 needed paperwork of an pressing actuality; nonetheless, 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 by way of principally nude self-portraits taken from mid-life by way of her latter many years.
“Mrs. Ludie Walker, Chattanooga, Tennessee” (1975) (© 2025 Rosalind Solomon, courtesy Museum of Fashionable Artwork)
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 effectively into her nineties.
Certainly 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 color [photography] was becoming in vogue. She stuck with her vision,” Grosbard informed Hyperallergic.
“She did not think of herself as a photographer; she thought of herself as an artist.”
