MACK Books, 2024

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A unique work of memoir formed of stark self-portraits made over the course of fifty years, interwoven with powerful texts providing a view of the artist’s personal journey.

At thirty-eight, while living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Rosalind Fox Solomon began a new life as a photographer. Studying with Lisette Model in the early 1970s, she honed the photographic voice which would define the prodigious half-century of work to follow. After moving to a loft in New York City in 1984, and travelling to Peru, India, South Africa, Cambodia, and beyond, she became renowned for her unflinching photography of everyday life around the world.

Throughout the same period, Solomon made self-portraits. Taking photography as a means of insistent introspection, over five decades Solomon studied the evolution of her aging body and embraced the self-estrangement her camera affords. A Woman I Once Knew brings these self-portraits together alongside extended texts by Solomon to form a unique work of autobiography, ambitious in its combination of image and text. Solomon’s writings allude to the periodic depressions and euphoric experiences in other cultures that defined her extraordinary life and shaped her empathetic approach to photography. They sit in fraught and suggestive dialogue with her revelatory self-portraits. A remarkable new work from an epochal photographer, this volume shows a startling rigorousness and sensitivity of self-examination which suggests the boundless possibilities of taking the self as subject.

MACK Books, 2021

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The book begins by meditating upon the differences and regularities that shape the lives of people around the world. In a Brazilian favela, a man daydreams while holding a reproduced painting of French royalty. In New York, a mother beams at her daughter who wears a Statue of Liberty Crown. In a school in rural Guatemala, young children pretend to make music with paper instruments.

As the sequence progresses, a darker story emerges from these images: one shaped by the violent events of recent global history, events which some may find it easier to forget. Through her powerful black-and-white photographs, Fox Solomon offers a reflection on the evils of war and its far-reaching ramifications. The bodies of her subjects bear all-too physical traces of conflict and aggressive foreign policy: two Cambodian teenagers who have lost their legs to landmines while gathering wood near their homes; victims of Agent Orange, a weapon of chemical warfare that continues to affect children born long after the end of the Vietnam war; a survivor of Hiroshima who reminds us of the abundant accumulation of nuclear bombs throughout the world today.

Collected here, Solomon’s compassionate images pay tribute while bearing unflinching witness to those people around the world whose bodies have become sites of conflict and stand as permanent memorials to the merciless pursuit of power.

MACK Books, 2018

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In 2018, MACK Books released Liberty Theater, a book of Rosalind Fox Solomon’s images of the American South made in the closing decades of the 20th Century. The book features more than 60 photographs, selected from a larger body of work that is far-ranging in both its physical and psychic geography.

Never before published as a group, Solomon’s images of the South trace a complex social and emotional inheritance—a world of class and gender divisions, implied and overt racism, competing notions of liberty, and lurking violence. But they also reveal a world marked by paradox, idiosyncrasy, and theatrical display: a Daughter of the Confederacy in costume with a doll from her collection; African American boys examining a vitrine of guns as two white police manikins loom behind them. Poised between act and reenactment, animate and inanimate, these images reveal how history becomes a vernacular performance and identity a form of self-fashioning.

The New York Times’ Best Photo Books of 2018.

TIME's 25 Best Photobooks of 2018.

Exhibited at Stephen Bulger Gallery, September 15—October 14, 2018.

MACK Books, 2016

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Part memoir and part fiction, Got To Go presents a collection of photographs from across Rosalind Fox Solomon’s life, contrasting a narrative of her own early years with other, urgent images that reveal a wider vision of the world, one outside of the rigid boundaries imposed by society and the home. If biography is a net cast upon us by family and shaped by social codes, Fox Solomon lays bare the limits of the net, as she negotiates the cusp between lived life and her imagination. Describing the work as a “tragicomedy”, full of both humor and pathos, Fox Solomon probes those limits we impose on the self, not only social codes but also the inherited tenets which are so difficult to escape.

The New York Times’ Best Photo Books of 2016.

TIME's Best Photobooks of 2016.

MACK Books, 2014

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they hammer your head
they wrap you in the flag
they dance, and shout
messiah messiah messiah

Rosalind Fox Solomon spent five months in Israel and the West Bank during 2010-11, traveling by local bus along with commuter workers. Her subjects included Jewish teenagers at Purim, Christians at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and Ghanian pilgrims at the Mount of Olives.

Punctuating the images are fragments of text – amusing and frightening background conversations, recorded in Solomon’s journal; the texts reveal the humanity of each person photographed, a window onto lives conditioned by violence and uncertainty.

Steidl, 2006

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Rosalind Solomon made her first pictures in Poland in 1988 during a time of political change, and returned there in 2003, a time of increasing violence and inhumanity in the world. All of the images are of individuals, their relationships and environments and are observations and commentaries on Poland itself, as well as on the rest of the world. Polish Shadow at times evokes the darkness of an earlier era and recalls the ghosts of ethnic violence, but also gives a human view of modern Poland.

For over 30 years Solomon has been producing emotional imagery which pulls the viewer into a world of sun and shadow where past and present intersect. As one commentator put it: “Rosalind Solomon embraces her subjects with unusual warmth—a combination of candor, curiosity and concern.” Her photographs provoke a physical, gut reaction and her empathy and sensitivity inform her images, giving them substance and power. Her photographs are influenced by the films of Luis Buñuel and Satyajit Ray, whom she met and photographed in Calcutta.

Steidl, 2004

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Solomon's first monograph, Chapalingas, tells tales of rootedness and loneliness, poverty and affluence, moments of hope and moments of happiness. The photographs are grouped into associative categories such as Food, Wheels, Splits, Hearts, Play and Faith, prompting the viewer to compare the motifs present in her more than 160 images. Accompanied by Solomon’s poetic text, which sheds light on the contexts in which her photographs were taken and the personal thoughts they engendered.