Sunday, June 16, 2013

Rosalind Solomon: One of "The First 15"


After visiting the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY to view "The First 15: Photography from the Meredith S. Moody Residency at Yaddo" Rosalind Solomon's photo titled "Blind Girl and Dolls" stood out from the rest.  I decided to acquaint myself with more of her work and her story.

In a nutshell, Rosalind Solomon is inspired by travel, politics, and people (often those faced with hardship) .  She has traveled around the world taking pictures since the 1970's.  She's photographed in places such as Washington DC, Alabama, New Orleans, New York City, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala Highlands, Columbia, Northern Ireland, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, Israel, Jordan, West Bank, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Tibet, India, Nepal, and Cambodia.

According to her website www.rosalindsolomon.com...

Solomon’s photographs are in the collections of over 50 museums. Her work has been shown in nearly 30 solo exhibitions and in 75 group exhibitions. [...] Rosalind Solomon was born in 1930 in Highland Park, Illinois. She graduated from Goucher College in 1951 with a degree in Political Science.  Following her graduation, she traveled to Belgium and France with The Experiment in International Living, an organization with which she remained closely associated for the next two decades.  Solomon married and moved to Chattanooga, TN, in 1953 where she raised her two children.  [...] In 1968 the Experiment sent Solomon to Tokyo, and it was there that she discovered photography. She began taking pictures with an Instamatic, expressing herself in a new way. A year later, she purchased a Nikkormat and set up her own darkroom. 

I'm attracted to her work because of it's candid and spontaneous nature, the pathos of her subjects, and the beauty of the compositions that seem to teeter upon the thin line between controlled and uncontrolled, deliberate and accidental.









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