Commentary

Reviews of Inside Out at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery,
March – April 2008

The New Yorker
Modern Painters
Art in America

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Four Questions for Rosalind Solomon
by Michael David Murphy on 2point8

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Reviews of American Pictures from Chapalingas
at Foley Gallery, April 20 — June 3, 2006

 

Ken Johnson — New York Times, May 12-26, 2006:

“This excellent exhibition of works from 1974 to 2000 surveys the career of a photographer with a keen eye for human individuality and a pitch-perfect sense of composition. Her art bears a family resemblance to that of Diane Arbus, but it is gentler and kinder.”

Randy Kennedy – in Art and Architecture, New York Times, May 7, 2006:

“Taking up her camera for the first time when she was 38, Ms. Solomon studied privately with Lisette Model and came into her own in the 1970’s working in the postmodern noir-ish tradition of artists like Diane Arbus and Larry Fink…”

The New Yorker, May 29, 2006:

“Like Diane Arbus and Lisette Model (who was Solomon’s, as well as Arbus’s teacher), Solomon makes no apparent effort to ingratiate herself with either her subjects or her viewers. The twenty-two black-and-white portraits in her welcome new show were made between 1974 and 2000 and share an inquisitive, almost anthropological approach that is determinedly unsentimental but not unsympathetic. She regards a young man whose face is splotched with lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a pregnant panhandler, a gaggle of gray-haired Princeton alumni and several remarkable children with a volatile mix of caution and concern.”

 

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Reviews of Chapalingas (Steidl, 2003)

Vince Aletti in Photograph magazine:

“The first comprehensive overview of Rosalind Solomon's work is a moving record of a 30-year journey of discovery by a photographer whose commitment to her own flinty, humanist vision places her, as Ingrid Sischy writes in the introduction, among an 'endangered species.' Organized poetically, Solomon's book embraces her subjects with unusual warmth—a combination of candor, curiosity, concern, and almost helpless yearning.”

Chapalingas was one the Village Voice's Top Twenty Photo Books of 2003

Review in Art on Paper, Sept./Oct. 2003.

Review in (London) Times Higher Education by Mark Haworth-Booth, Oct. 2004.

 

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Other Commentary

Peter Galassi — commenting on Rosalind Solomon in her solo exhibit Ritual at the Museum of Modern Art, 1986:

“For Solomon, the extravagant public theatre of ritual is an expression of private feelings and struggles, which she invites — or compels — the viewer to share. Her ability to do so depends on the keenness of her perceptions and the relentless clarity and detail with which she records them.”

Up Close and Personal in London's The Telegraph Magazine, Oct. 18, 2003

Portraits/Visages 1853 - 2003, Bibliotheque nationale de France/Gallimard

Fur across the Heart, Manfred Zollner, Fotomagazin 7/2003