She began photographing late in life, almost by accident. It was 1968, in Japan, during a cultural exchange program. She was 38 years old. Until then, nothing predestined her for a career as an artist. Married, the mother of two children, she was living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. However, something was triggered at that moment: an attention to the world, a way of looking. The gesture would become a profession, then œuvre. “I really started photography by accident,” she told Blind in 2022.
Rosalind Fox Solomon died on June 23, 2025, in New York City, at the age of 95. In half a century of photographic practice, she built a dense body of work, punctuated by motionless figures, suspended faces, ritual gestures, and what resists simplification. She never ceased to question what we see and what we do not see.
The American leaves behind a singular body of work, constructed far removed from traditional schools and trends. From the heartland of America to the rituals of South Africa, from portraits of masked men to faces scarred by the AIDS epidemic, she captured the silence, confusion, and complexity contained in the image.
A moving look
In New York, she began showing her images to Lisette Model, a demanding mentor who encouraged her, cut into her contact sheets, and urged her to get closer. Like Arbus, but without voyeurism, Fox Solomon approached. Always. Until she was there, almost in the other person’s skin. Her gaze sharpened, her signature emerged. “I saw her intermittently, when I accompanied my husband to New York. I would bring her my work, and she would critique it.”
In the 1970s, she photographed across the United States: rural fairs, modest homes, grieving families, religious ceremonies. Unlike cold or distant documentary photography, her work seeks ambiguity. She doesn’t tell a story; she leaves the images open. In the faces photographed, there is abandonment, resistance, and sometimes irony.
At the Alabama fairs, she photographed men in tank tops, women in curlers, children in costumes, and dense solitudes. “I just looked at them, asked if I could take their picture.” No one asked questions. Not her, not them. It was a matter of gaze, of silent tension.
Fox Solomon’s vision became international at the end of the decade, thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship. She traveled to South Africa, Peru, India, and Poland. She photographed children in disguise, couples in the shadows, priests, the sick, and anonymous people. Her images, often shot in black and white using medium format, convey a sense of depth. She captured situations that escape the pure instant: moments when something is held back, or closed off.
Portraits in the time of the epidemic
In the 1980s, Rosalind Fox Solomon began photographing people affected by AIDS. The series, titled “Portraits in the Time of AIDS”, marked a turning point. Again, there was no drama. She photographed patients, caregivers, and loved ones. The images were frontal, stripped down. No staging. No overt militant intent. But there was an attention to what, in the body or the gaze, conveyed the concern.
In 1988, the series was exhibited at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU in New York. It was re-exhibited in 2015 at the Grand Palais, part of Paris Photo. This marked the occasion for a new generation to discover this moving, untimely work. It doesn’t document; it summons.
She continued to explore this type of presence in other notable series, such as “Polish Shadow” (2006), “THEM” (2014), and “Got to Go” (2016). The tone was always sober, often serious, never sentimental. Even in the most intimate images, even in the late self-portraits, she maintained a form of distance.
A feminine voice, free, rough
Rosalind Fox Solomon never sought to please. Nor to seduce. She didn’t follow trends or the grand narratives of humanist or documentary photography. She followed her own path, often in reverse. She was a woman in a man’s world, but never claimed to be anything other than an artist.
“I think being a woman helped me. People may have found me less threatening. But I wasn’t gentler than a man.” Her relationship with otherness was not based on compassion, but on a harsh lucidity. She was not there to comfort.
Her visual language, direct, almost brutal, was never gratuitous. It drew on a silent empathy, on a desire to understand. One can thus say that her photography is a mirror that is both distorting and faithful. It expresses confusion, unease, beauty, the grotesque, and grace.
A slow but lasting recognition
For a long time, Solomon’s work remained on the fringes. Galleries took a late interest in it. However, institutions were not unaware of his approach. In 1986, the MoMA in New York dedicated a solo exhibition to him (“Ritual”). Her works gradually entered the collections of major institutions: the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Whitney, the Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery in Washington, and the Getty. But her name remained relatively unknown to the general public until the 2000s.
It was not until Chapalingas, published by Steidl in 2003, that her work found its first major retrospective book. It brought together nearly 180 photographs taken between 1973 and 2001. The collection draws a personal territory, composed of tensions, fragments, and multiple identities. From then on, her work circulated more widely. Paris Photo paid tribute to her in 2015. Exhibitions followed one after the other.
Last book, last voice
In March 2024, she published A Woman I Once Knew, released by MACK. The book brought together previously unpublished photographs, notes, and memories. It is interspersed with short, often elliptical texts. She talked about old age, memory, and language. “I no longer understand language,” she wrote. It is a book that is both dense and sober, the testament of a photographer who has always preferred suggestion to explanation.
Rosalind Fox Solomon also never sought to belong to a particular movement. She built a discreet, coherent body of work that was radical in its refusal to simplify. Through the figures she photographed, she offered a unique perspective on human complexity.
She lived for 40 years in a loft in Manhattan’s Washington Square neighborhood. An apartment filled with archives, books, and objects. She also took photographs there. She sometimes said that walls spoke better than people. In her later years, she jotted down fragments in notebooks: dreams, snatches of sentences, thoughts without a subject. One day, when asked what linked all her images, she simply replied: “I photograph because I don’t understand.”
More information on Rosalind Fox Solomon can be found here.
