Citations Ed.9 - Rosalind Fox Solomon

In 1968, when she was 38, Rosalind Fox Solomon (b. 1930, d. 2025) traveled to Japan as part of the Experment in International Living, an organization that sought to promote intercultural understanding by placing westerners in the homes of Asian and European households. Participants often did not speak the hosts’ languages; in an interview with the novelist Francine Prose, Fox Solomon explained that “taking pictures [was] a way of talking to myself. I got the sensation of what it was to get something out through a camera that might represent what I was seeing and feeling. ”Ironically, the loneliness in Japan freed Fox Solomon from the loneliness she had known for most of her life in the United States.

Born to well-heeled yet removed and judgemental parents, then married to a prominent southern businessman who would enjoy political success by working for the Carter administration, Fox Solomon’s life up to 1968 was one shaped, constrained, and defined by the typical strictures of midcentury expectations of womanly societal life. Her mother discouraged her from writing, and criticized her body and behaviors in the name of raising her to be a “lovely woman.” Her husband, real estate developer, foisted onto Fox Solomon dinner party and entertainment duty to potential clients and their wives. In Japan, the linguistic and cultural barriers forced her into a different corne —her self—and thus helped her escape from her upbringing and married life. Speaking
to New York Magazine, Fox Solomon said that photography “allowed me to put in the forefront parts of myself that I had not yet realized – that had not yet been in my consciousness.” The language of photography delivered to Fox Solomon the person she did not know, the person she could not even imagine to be, but whom she would discover, develop, and nurture for the rest of her life.

Soon after, Fox Solomon began her tutelage with Lisette Model, the photographer who trained Diane Arbus. The relationship was consequential for Fox Solomon, as it began her career as an art photographer. Model taught Fox Solomon to be selfish and precious with her time and work, to be uncompromising with her practice and to resist complacency. Such principles helped Fox Solomon produce the work she is most known for, including her portraits of the AIDS crisis in New York City and her work in Israel and Palestine. In them are exemplars of her style, an unsentimental empathy for her subjects, the serious awareness of their vulnerability within their given circumstances. Young men succumbing to AIDS bear their Kaposi’s sarcomas openly. The portrait of a young man in Tel Aviv breaks open political and religious divides through the Arabic script tattooed over his heart: Indeterminate when clothed on the streets in Tel Aviv, his faith revealed only in the the intimacies of a private room.

Fox Solomon died in 2025 at the age of 95, shortly after the publication of A Woman I Once Knew, an anthology of self-peortraits taken over the course of a fifty year period. Full-length portraits of her nude aged body both document and reflect her experiences of the same she’d practiced throughout her career. Close-ups of her fingers and toes, often with broken nails and bulbous bunions and callouses, challenge what the writer and critic Lynne Tillman sees as the still dominant regime of the male gaze. Fox Solomon “[sees] with [her] own eyes.” She “hides as she exposes: her photographs insist that exposing is not revealing.” In these images, we witness Fox Solomon speaking to herself, asking the same questions that she asked of her subjects: “‘Who is this person? What does this person think about and feel?’ ”

We have at least one answer to that in A Woman I Once Knew, articulated in a text on the verso: “I like the people / I love them / But I’m also making comments on them and their values / I cannot be part of them.”

The final image of A Woman I Once Knew is Fox Solomon resting her chin on a gravemarker, her surname “SOLOMON” engraved on it. It’s unclear whether this is her own grave or another Solomon’s, but her subtle, contented smile, the gentleness in her closed eyes, suggest relief at having reached the end with all the women she had come to know.