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Chronology
Born Rosalind Fox, April 2, 1930 in Highland Park, Illinois.
Graduated from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland with a Bachelor
of Arts in Political Science. She went to Belgium and France with The
Experiment in International Living.
In 1953 Rosalind Fox married and moved from Chicago, Illinois to Chattanooga,
Tennessee. She had a son, Joel, in 1954 and a daughter, Linda, in 1956.
In 1961, Rosalind Solomon was Regional Director of The Experiment in
International Living and visited communities throughout the Southern
United States recruiting host families to receive international guests.
In 1968 the organization arranged for her to stay with a family near
Tokyo. While in Japan, Solomon used a Kodak Instamatic and made color
slides.
Solomon began to photograph regularly. She purchased a Nikkormat in
1969 and set up a home darkroom to process black and white pictures.
In 1974, Solomon began intermittent studies with Lisette Model during
visits to New York City. At the time, Solomon was photographing damaged
dolls, as well as people, at a monthly market in Scottsboro, Alabama,
and Model advised her to work with both a 35 millimeter and a 2 1/4
x 2 1/4 inch camera in order to master the medium-format camera.
In 1975 and 1976 she used a Mamiya 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 inch camera to
photograph patients in Chattanooga, Tennessee at the Baroness Erlanger
Hospital and in Sicily. One of the Sicily photographs, a hooded boy,
was the first of Rosalind Solomon's images to be exhibited at the Museum
of Modern Art, New York.
Solomon acquired the Hasselblad which she continues to use. She lived
and worked in Washington, where she made pictures of artists and politicians
and completed a series, "Outside the White House." She traveled
to the Guatemala Highlands during this period and photographed rural
people and rituals.
In 1980, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, exhibited "Rosalind
Solomon: Washington," with an accompanying catalogue, and the Sander
Gallery in Washington showed "Rosalind Solomon, Photographs."
Solomon received a Guggenheim Fellowship,which supported her work in
Brazil and Peru. She made Carnival, an edition of four albums with collaged
covers, and a boxed assemblage, Corazón. She returned to Peru
in 1981 and 1982, photographing, shooting super 8 film and making tape
recordings. In 1981 – 1983, the American Institute of Indian Studies,
a major organization supporting scholarly and artistic work in Southeast
Asia, awarded her fellowships to photograph Indian festivals. George
Eastman House, Rochester, NY, exhibited and toured "Rosalind Solomon:
India" which then traveled to the Smithsonian's American Museum
of Natural History in Washington DC and other venues. The American Centers
in India exhibited another group of Solomon's India pictures in New
Delhi, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta.
Rosalind Solomon divorced in 1984 and moved to lower Manhattan where
she built her darkroom and studio. She produced two installation pieces,
Adiós and Catacombs. In 1985 she photographed the earthquake
aftermath in Mexico City, and in 1986 she took a series of New York
street portraits and a series of portraits outside Buddhist temples
in Katmandu. The artist's unique album, Along the Road, evolved from
her experience in Nepal. In 1986, the Museum of Photographic Arts in
San Diego, California, mounted an exhibition of eighty-six Solomon works
with a catalogue, "Rosalind Solomon, Earthrites." Another
exhibition, "Rosalind Solomon, Ritual," opened later that
year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
In 1987, Solomon photographed people with AIDS in the USA. In 1988 Grey
Art Gallery, New York University mounted a solo exhibition of these
pictures and published the catalogue, Portraits in the Time of AIDS.
From 1988 to 1990, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts
helped support her work in South Africa and in Dublin and Belfast, Ireland.
She also traveled to Agua de Dios, Colombia, where she photographed
people with Hansen’s Disease. During this time she also worked
on a survivors' project in Poland,
Yugoslavia, Cambodia, and Cuba and lived part-time in New Orleans where
she photographed musicians and festivals.
During this period, Solomon photographed in Peru for five months. In
1996, Lima's El Museo de Arte presented Solomon's pictures in "Peru
y Otros Lugares - Peru and Other Places." A catalogue accompanied
the exhibition, which included her Peru work from the eighties and the
nineties as well as other pictures from locations in Latin America,
India and the United States.
In 1998 she traveled to Tibet and revisited India and
Nepal. During that year, Solomon finished her video piece, To Highlands,
incorporating early 80’s super 8 film and mid-90’s video footage
from Peru, Tibet and Highland Park, Illinois. In 1999, Solomon traveled
to Israel and also visited Jordan. In 2000 – 2001, Solomon photographed
in the USA, Italy and Peru. Yaddo awarded Rosalind Solomon the John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur residency. While at Yaddo, she completed
the selection of pictures for Chapalingas, worked on the texts, and
photographed artists. In 2002, she was awarded residencies at the MacDowell
Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire and at Blue Mountain Center, Blue
Mountain Lake, New York. During her two-month residency at the MacDowell
Colony, she sequenced the Chapalingas images, continued her self-portraits,
photographed artists and began writing Grave Mail. She was appointed
a MacDowell Colony National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. In 2003 Solomon
was invited back to MacDowell and was selected Ray and Abraham Gottlieb
Fellow. During the year, she photographed people and sites in Poland;
Ladakh, India; and British Columbia, Canada. In the Spring, Die Photographische
Sammlung exhibited her pictures in Cologne, Germany. Die Photographische
Sammlung and Steidl Verlag co-published the accompanying catalogue,
Chapalingas, in English, German and French with
201 full-page reproductions.
Solomon spent most of 2005 working on her extensive
archives in her New York studio. She also returned to Yaddo to sequence
pictures for Polish Shadow. During this ongoing work, Solomon also found
time to return to Peru and to make a first trip to Argentina. She photographed
in Peru for the 9th time since 1980, and took pictures in Paris and
New York as well.
In 2005, the New York-based Foley Gallery began representing
Solomon. In 2006, the Foley Gallery ran the solo exhibition: “Rosalind
Solomon, American Pictures from Chapalingas.”
In 2006, Solomon continued her travels, photographing
in Berlin and later traveling to Vienna for the opening of “Americans:
Masterpieces of American Photography from 1940 until Now.” From
November 2006 to February 2007, Solomon’s work is exhibited along
with12 American greats including Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert
Frank Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, and Gordon Parks.
In 2007, Solomon traveled and photographed in
Hanoi. She sent the first shipment of her archive to The Center for
Creative Photography.
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