Fur across the heart

Manfred Zollner, Fotomagazin 7/2003

The photo discovery of the year: Rosalind Solomon’s surreal-poetic work was recently presented for the first time in Germany in the Cologne "Chapalingas" exhibition.

I asked the shaman, "How will I find love?" He replied, "Rub a guinea pig over your heart." Rosalind Solomon’s best photographs affect us like the event which took place in the highlands of South America and is described by her in the book "Chapalingas." Cold stone hearts lie there in the landscape and just wait for our emotions to rub themselves on the hard rock, gazes pose basic questions about life and suddenly a child's casual gesture provides all the answers. "Chapalingas" is a neologism devised by the photographer, who blends the title of a traditional Mexican song title with the name of a kind of grasshopper, allocates it to flickering swarms of images, a wildly associative classified universe of gazes and finally a comprehensive, very subjectively characterized view of the "Condition humaine." Until June 9 the Photographische Sammlung der SK Stiftung Kultur in Cologne showed Solomon’s breathtaking, sometimes particularly mystic work for the first time and presented it comprehensively to the German public. And thus compiled the best photo exhibition in the German photo scene this year...

Solomon's portraits are always a mirror of the soul, the momentary state of the sitter as well as of the photographer. We see pictures of yearning and fear. Photos of surreal appearances, accidental events or fate. Images which follow in the tradition of the New York Street Photography, full of poetry and shamanistic power, pictures which touch our hearts. The Cologne exhibition shows us part of an oeuvre we would like to see more of.

- Translated by Patricia Edgar