Essays
Inside Rosalind Fox Solomon’s New York Studio
In her airy live-work loft high above the cacophony of downtown Manhattan, the photographer reflects on her decades-long career.
Photographs by Jason Nocito for Aperture
This article originally appeared in Aperture, Spring 2023, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live,” under the column Studio Visit.
Rosalind Fox Solomon’s home and studio are on an upper floor of an eight-story former commercial building in the NoHo Historic District of New York. Completed in 1893 and named by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1999, it was designed by the German American architect Alfred Zucker at a time when the area’s Federal-style mansions were being replaced by high-rise structures.
Fox Solomon has lived and worked inside Zucker’s iron, granite, and terra-cotta building on Broadway since 1984. Her loft is a treasury for a nomadic life spent traveling around the world taking photographs of people—meeting them where they live. For more than fifty-five years, she has built an affecting body of images attentive to the human condition, probing its vulnerability and struggles, scrutinizing the pleasures and toxicities that define us. “What I was interested in was psychological . . . what was going on inside people,” Fox Solomon told me.
Entering for a recent visit, I’m greeted by the photographer’s cat, Little Lady Lola, and immediately encounter a large sculpture, of human height, created by the artist in 1980. Titled Adios, the piece (something of an homage to her divorce around that date) is based on tombs in Peru. “I really loved working there,” Fox Solomon says. “At that time, people came to mountain climb; otherwise there weren’t any tourists. It was kind of untouched.” Fox Solomon has traveled extensively throughout the United States, as well as to remote places in Asia and Latin America. The studio’s walls are filled with her own images, interspersed with art and objects collected on the many trips. Portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron and Richard Avedon—of John Szarkowski—also adorn the walls.
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Born in a Chicago suburb in 1930, Fox Solomon began photographing with an Instamatic camera at the age of thirty-eight while living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with her then husband and two children. While participating in a cultural exchange program called the Experiment in International Living, she cultivated an interest in travel and photography. On a visit to New York, she was introduced to Lisette Model, the legendary Austrian-born American artist who helped redefine street photography. In 1974, Fox Solomon began studying privately with Model, continuing until 1976. A mere decade later, the Museum of Modern Art organized Rosalind Solomon: Ritual, an exhibition of thirty-four pictures made between 1975 and 1985.
Her photographs complicate and layer meaning, challenging viewers to go beyond familiar narratives. Early examples taken in the 1970s pointedly capture the legally desegregated but still racially divided American South, a place Fox Solomon would photograph into the 1990s. A collection of these images is featured in the book Liberty Theater (2018), named after one of the last cinemas in Chattanooga to remain segregated. Abroad, Fox Solomon made photographs that depict cultures and locations amid political strife—violent terrorism in Peru, apartheid in South Africa, ethnic violence in Northern Ireland—but that move beyond conventional documentary description to work that is suggestive of her relationship with her subjects. “I don’t like to talk too much to people when I’m photographing because I’m interested in reaching the interior. I don’t want them to be functioning on a superficial level,” she says.
At ninety-two, Fox Solomon shows no signs of slowing down. Her groundbreaking and intimate project Portraits in the Time of AIDS (1987–88), first exhibited at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, three blocks from her apartment, was recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art. Last year’s edition of Paris Photo included a solo exhibition, organized by MUUS Collection, of Fox Solomon’s early series from the 1970s portraying scenes at a flea market in Scottsboro, Alabama. She is currently focused on a new book due out this year. “I’m enjoying having my work get out the way it’s been getting out,” she says. “It’s exciting to have all this going on at my age. I’m really fortunate to have lived to see this recognition. It’s kind of beyond belief.”
Photographs by Jason Nocito for Aperture
Never one to photograph commercially, and rarely on commission, Fox Solomon has had a prolific career that includes more than thirty solo exhibitions and a hundred group shows; her work is held in prominent museum collections worldwide. Even decades after she photographed them, Fox Solomon’s remarkable pictures continue to hold their power. They are as much about the subjects and how they see themselves as they are about how we see and understand the subjects. Her particular method of portraiture urges us to examine people and our preconceptions more carefully.
“If I had the courage, today I would go photograph people on the extreme right. That’s what I would be attracted to doing,” says Fox Solomon. “And probably I could do it because I’m old and nobody would think of me as dangerous. That was how I did a lot of my work. Because I was always older and I just don’t think that people were afraid, although I think they could have been.”
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 250, “We Make Pictures in Order to Live,” Spring 2023.
