Photographer Rosalind Fox Salomon did not have the opportunity to embark on his as an artist until the early 1950s. For this reason, the visual component of A woman I once knew – An archive of several decades of unwavering self -portraits of an artist announced for his portraits of others – begins only in the life of Solomon. But the text of the book, written by Solomon herself, traces her life at his origins. With a remarkable economy of language, the volume presents a nonagenarian life story containing a whole range of human experience, accompanied by images which highlight the aging female form in a striking and shame.
Solomon was initially thwarted from her first inclinations to reflection and self -expression by generational expectations: she was born in 1930 from a family of traditional aspirations in Highland Park, Illinois. After having abandoned his passion for reading and writing and married a man from the south nine, his senior who rigorously limited the axis of his career outside their family; After having carried two children per cesarean and balanced their education with political volunteering and local activism; After the changing fortune of her family and the dissolution of her husband's career, a drop in her health and the final collapse of their marriage – only, at the age of 53, Solomon is committed to forging his way as an artist in the world.
And in the world, she went – in the Peruvian Andes, in Kolkata, India, in parts of Zimbabwe. In the late 1980s, she produced the revolutionary series Portraits at the time of AIDSOne of the first to turn his goal on the booming epidemic while the political rotation cycle was still firmly in denial. Vogue Subsequently, assigned him to photograph AIDS womenwith sex workers in Honduras, with its publisher stressing that images “must be optimistic. “”
Throughout the text, Fox Solomon cites the international network of contacts and managers who helped her access some of the most creative and dangerous circles in the world. Sometimes we see overviews of these friends and professional contacts alongside her in free images, but the majority is of the artist alone, often naked, generally serious.
None of the images in A woman I once knew are subtitled or dated, although they are increasing an almost chronological progression in the last decades of Solomon. The captures in close -up of his body present strongly, sometimes with interventions such as adhesive tape or household accessories, often focusing on the physical attributes that women are formed to hide: hairy genitals, sagged breasts, a The soft abdomen bearing the scars of several surgeries, feet disfigured by hammergies and rotten nails. If Solomon has made a name for himself through his desire to turn a flawless eye on the reality of her subjects, this book testifies to the fact that she does not hesitate to allow herself the same treatment.
In 2019, the International Photography Center awarded Fox Solomon Lifetime success priceAnd she also received a national endowment for the Arts Stock Exchange, a Portrait Lucie achievement and a Guggenheim scholarship. Nevertheless, his text recounts self-sabotage, psychosis and health struggles that most people meet, in one form or another, while they move in their aging process, even with success and self-activation through art. A woman I once knew is a rare portrait of an artist who considers all aspects of his life and herself a fair and worthy game, to his onions. While we are fighting collectively against the social and political forces that seek to constrain the way in which women move in the world and the choices we have – including the agency on our own body – it is powerful to attend the determination of Solomon to capture and consider themselves, no less important than all the work of his other life.
A woman I once knew (2024) by Rosalind Fox Solomon is published by Mack and is available online and via independent booksellers.
