Rosalind Solomon

Whether photographing at home or abroad, I am interested primarily in emotional content and form. — Rosalind Solomon

Since 1968 Rosalind Solomon has made photographs of the rituals and rhythms of non-industrial life, as well as investigating related concerns closer to home. She turns her lens to the varying cultures of such places as India, Haiti, Colombia, Poland, Mali, Zimbabwe, and her native United States. In 1986 alone she visited Mexico, France, and Indonesia. Though Solomon is perhaps most famous for her portraits, her oeuvre also includes work like the 1987 print Pillarama, Indonesia in which the human presence is only implied, in this case by a line of drying clothes neatly weaving through an outdoor space anchored by five unbalanced pillars.

Rosalind Fox was born April 2, 1930 in Highland Park, Illinois. In 1951 she received a BA degree in political science from Goucher College in Baltimore Maryland and traveled to Belgium and France with The Experiment in International Living. She married in 1953 and took the name Solomon. She decided to become a photographer in 1968 after traveling in Japan, Thailand, and Cambodia, and went on to study photography with Lisette Model in the early 1970s. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1979, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for 1988-1989, and grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies from 1981 to 1984 to photograph in Peru, Ecuador, India, and Nepal. The Museum of Contemporary Photography presented her solo exhibition Rosalind Solomon: Rites and Ritual in 1990. Other solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Willy-Brandt-Haus, Berlin; Museo de Arte de Lima; Instituto de Estudios Norte Americanos, Barcelona, Spain; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, among others.

Text © Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2018