Portfolios
Rosalind Fox Solomon’s New York City
For half a century, Fox Solomon photographed New Yorkers and their habitats, unraveling the city’s public and private histories.
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” Spring 2021.
Rosalind Fox Solomon found her calling, photography, in her late thirties. Fox Solomon’s teacher, Lisette Model, encouraged her daring and self-confidence. With a camera, Fox Solomon could view life from her own angle, her distinctive vision.
Fox Solomon has traveled widely, photographing in Peru, the American South, Israel, and the West Bank, to name a few places. But, she tells me, “I did not find myself shooting in New York City in a different way. I made portraits of people and imagined their concerns. As I shoot, there is always inner tension, a trance-like state that contrasts with a nice-girl smile. That’s how I work everywhere.”
Over the last five decades, Fox Solomon has pictured New York through its events, inhabitants, and objects. Her commitment to social justice animates her choice of subjects, and her pictures often show those who are troubled, suffering, or in crisis.
A young man with AIDS looks solemnly at the camera. He appears resolute, an implacable expression on his face. “It was wrenching shooting people with AIDS,” Fox Solomon tells me. “I met and photographed them, and some died soon after.” Her exhibition Portraits in the Time of AIDS at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in 1988, in the midst of the epidemic, insisted on the public’s awareness of the suffering of so-called ordinary people.
People in wheelchairs on the Staten Island Ferry, people standing, all with their backs to the viewer, are looking at the water or the skyline, or inwardly. What they are thinking about, how they feel, is unknowable; but imaginations are spurred to wonder.
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After 9/11, handmade posters of the missing showed up on walls all over Lower Manhattan. “From a poster, I learned about the death of a friend, the artist Michael Richards,” Fox Solomon says. The attack on the Twin Towers was political, but the effects were instantly personal, each poster a death. Fox Solomon’s photograph of the desperate pleas of families and friends, and not the city’s physical devastation, emphasized her concern with wrecked lives, not buildings.
A Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon, lying on a street, is a template for interpretation. This poetic image could register a tragic reality: Americans celebrate a family holiday, which elides North America’s first families, almost entirely wiped out by the US government. Or, it might represent the melancholy that comes after the fun ends, or how temporary pleasure is. There are many ways to see it.
People can see so differently from each other, so idiosyncratically. Eyewitnesses have different eyes. There may sometimes be a consensus about a photograph—this is a good picture—but judgments about its meanings vary. Photographs don’t reveal themselves, don’t investigate, don’t tell us how to see them. Reactions to any picture depend on a viewer’s subjectivity, psychology, sympathies, sensibility, and more. An understanding of that dissonance inheres in Fox Solomon’s imagery. These photographs are gentle, also tough and unsentimental, sometimes tender yet unsettling.
Fox Solomon’s New York photographs look at the past and augment public and private histories. They are impressions of what compelled her, or disturbed her, about how people lived and what shaped their lives. Her photographs intend an intimacy, a connection and closeness to this place.
Looking at this work now, Fox Solomon says, “I am struck by the fact that my themes and interests are consistent—people, their differences and similarities; relationships; and issues such as race relations, politics, women’s roles, illness.”
All photographs courtesy the artist
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 242, “New York,” Spring 2021.
