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Remembering Rosalind Fox Solomon
28 June 2025
Rosalind Fox Solomon died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 95.
Solomon was born in Highland Park, Ill., and graduated from Highland Park High School in 1947. She attended Goucher College in Baltimore, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science in 1951.
She met her husband Joel W. Solomon shortly after and they moved to Chattanooga, Tenn. His family owned movie theaters.
As the Southern regional director of the Experiment in International Living, she visited communities throughout the southern United States, where she recruited families to host international guests. In 1963, she went to Washington, D.C. to interview with the Equal Employment Department of the United States Agency for International Development. In her work for USAID, Solomon traveled to historically black colleges in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee where she spoke about overseas employment opportunities.
She was 38 before she started taking pictures. In 1968, she visited to Japan where she used an Instamatic camera to record her impressions. It also became "a way that I just could communicate with myself," she said.
"I never stopped after that," she said of her photography, "because I felt something about being able to communicate, you know, this inner-outer communication, and I came back with my pictures from Japan, and people said -- people I respected said, 'Oh, these are just so great. You have to go on with this.'"
So back in the U.S. the next year, she bought a Nikkormat and learned to process black-and-white film in her garden shed. In 1971 she began studies with Lisette Model during visits to New York City and continued them until 1977. She started working in medium format in 1974 still using black-and-white film.
The next year, she began photographing at the Baroness Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga, Tenn., where she photographed people recovering from operations, wounds and illness.
She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979 and traveled to Guatemala, Peru, India, South Africa and elsewhere, photographing shamans, funerals, rituals and festivals.
She would continue her pursuit of penetrating portraits in the American South, Israel and diverse spots around the globe. Her work was sometimes compared to Diane Arbus, but it was said she infused hers with more warmth and humanity.
In 2007, the Center for Creative Photography at theUniversity of Arizona acquired Solomon's archive, including her photographic archive, books and video work. In 2019, she received the International Center of Photography's Lifetime Achievement Infinity Award.
She had nearly 30 solo exhibitions, including the 1986 show Rosalind Fox Solomon: Ritual at the Museum of Modern Art. Her work is held in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography, Museum of Modern Art, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur.
She is survived by a daughter, Linda Solomon Wood, a son, Joel Solomon, and eight grandchildren.