RosalindFoxSolomon

Rosalind Fox Solomon (1930, Highland Park, Illinois – 2025, New York City) graduated from Goucher College, married, moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and raised two children. At the age of 38, after a career in international exchange, she began photographing in Tennessee and Alabama. During visits to New York she met Lisette Model, who critiqued her photographs, told her she had a unique vision, and encouraged her to devote her life to photography.

Over more than fifty years, Solomon photographed across the American South and abroad, responding to human vulnerability and the struggle for survival, and examining life conditioned by race, religion and ethnicity. In Belfast and Belgrade she photographed with ethnic strife in mind; in Poland, thinking of the Holocaust; she photographed the wounded of Hanoi and Phnom Penh, and confronted apartheid in South Africa. She later took part in This Place, a global project exploring the complexity of Israel and the West Bank, photographing Christian pilgrims' rituals and making portraits of Israelis, Palestinians and Africans.

In 1987, when many young men and women dying of AIDS were ostracized even by their own families, Solomon — whose son lived with a progressive kidney disease — felt a strong affinity with them and began making portraits of people with AIDS, hoping her pictures might help remove the stigma attached to the sick and dying. Sixty-five of these images were shown as Portraits in the Time of AIDS at the Grey Art Gallery of New York University; a later selection of large-scale prints was exhibited at Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York, in 2013 and at Paris Photo, in the Salon d'Honneur of the Grand Palais, in 2015.

Her work entered the collections of over fifty museums worldwide, including MoMA, the Los Angeles County Museum, Museo de Arte de Lima, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; in 1986 MoMA exhibited her series Ritual. Steidl published her book Chapalingas in 2003 and Polish Shadow in 2006; MACK released three further books, including THEM in 2014, presented on stage at SVA with cellist Sam Im, and Liberty Theater in 2018, alongside a major exhibition at Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto. In 2019, during the expansion and renovation of MoMA, Solomon was invited to document the moment from the inside, producing Picturing MoMA — portraits of conservators, curators, guards and construction, tech and video teams that told the story of a pivotal moment in the institution's history. That same year she received the International Center of Photography's Lifetime Achievement Award.