Our presentation focuses entirely on the work of American photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon (1930–2025). In her striking, psychologically dense portraits, Fox Solomon explores fundamental themes of human existence: suffering and survival, struggle and affection, rituals, religiosity, and death.

Rosalind Fox Solomon was born in Highland Park, Illinois; she graduated in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, married, and moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she raised two children. It was not until 1968, at the age of 38, that she began taking photographs. A recurring motif in her early work includes dolls and store mannequins, as well as portraits of children. Beginning in 1971, during her visits to New York, she took private lessons with the photographer Lisette Model, who became her mentor and whose guiding principle she adopted: “Don’t shoot til the subject hits you in the pit of your stomach.” It was Model who told her she had a unique eye and who encouraged her to devote her life entirely to photography.

Our presentation features works spanning three decades, including portraits taken in the mid-1970s in the southern United States, in Tennessee and Alabama, as well as an extensive portrait series depicting Fox Solomon’s friend and fellow photographer William Eggleston and his family in Tennessee. When she moved to Washington, D.C., with her then-husband in 1977, she began work on the series Outside the White House, in which she captured artists and politicians, including Jimmy Carter. In the years that followed, Fox Solomon undertook extensive travel that took her repeatedly to South America. In her photographs taken there - of a shepherdess in Ancash, Peru, nursing a motherless lamb, or of a musician carrying an unpackaged bass on his back through the wilderness of Guatemala - she reveals the surprising and surreal in the everyday. This also applies to the photographs from Brazil, which she compiled in her 1980 artist’s book Carnival. They not only show the joyfully celebrating people but also repeatedly turn the gaze toward the unsettling or disturbing, such as when she photographs artificial limbs dangling from the ceiling in a store or a little boy sitting and smiling shyly in front of a pile of children’s coffins stacked behind him.

The center piece of the presentation is a group of fifteen rare, large-format prints from Fox Solomon’s series Portraits in the Time of AIDS. It was created in 1987–88, when the AIDS epidemic reached its peak. Her extensive project aimed to give a face to the many nameless victims of the disease. This deeply moving body of work depicts not only the patients themselves but also their friends and relatives, thereby illustrating the full extent of the social suffering caused by the autoimmune disease.

Fox Solomon’s interest in ethnic and religious conflicts led her to return to Northern Ireland repeatedly starting in 1988. Through her portraits of young children in Belfast, she sensitively illustrated how deeply the daily lives of this most innocent and vulnerable group of people were shaped by the effects of the Troubles. As in other series of works, Rosalind Fox Solomon here draws attention to the vulnerability of human existence with her open, direct, and consistently empathetic gaze, shedding light on the lived reality of her subjects, which is significantly shaped by their affiliation with a particular religion or ethnic group.

In her portfolio Women: Matter and Spirit, published in 2022, she compiled exclusively portraits of women taken between 1975 and 1993, which impressively document the diverse living conditions of women across three different continents and three decades.