Rosalind Fox Solomon, a photographer whose penetrating black-and-white portraits shot in the American South, Israel and diverse spots around the globe earned her the admiration of critics and a place in the world’s most prestigious museums, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 95.
Her death, in a hospital, was announced by the MUUS Collection, a photography archive that houses her work.
Ms. Fox Solomon was sometimes compared to Diane Arbus, and like Arbus, she studied with the great Austrian émigré photographer Lisette Model.
But unlike her more famous peer, Ms. Fox Solomon captured sometimes off-putting subjects with a warm intensity that infused them with humanity, even if they appeared strange or unappealing at first glance.
The white woman in “Poke Bonnet, First Mondays, Scottsboro, Alabama” (1976), in Ms. Fox Solomon’s 2018 book, “Liberty Theater,” appears pleased with herself and overconfident, potentially queasy attributes given the time and place. Like the subjects of Ms. Fox Solomon’s other portraits, she dominates the frame. But she is not an Arbus freak, nor is she grotesque. She is a familiar sort of woman in early middle age, not a caricature of a white Southerner.
The Black child in “Girl Rising, Mississippi” (1977) gazes away from the camera, seemingly filled with determination. But Ms. Fox Solomon captured a world of hurt in the child’s liquid eye, set jaw and slight grimace.
It was that ability to convey emotional nuance — what the writer Teju Cole called, in a review of “Liberty Theater” in The New York Times, “her special ability to register tiny interstitial moments” — that excited critics.
The portraits “pin her subjects in situations of inadvertency, when their faces and bodies are between one attitude and another,” Mr. Cole wrote. Those were the moments, Ms. Fox Solomon’s camera seemed to say, when subjects were most susceptible to interpretation.
Similarly, a portrait of young Israelis in uniform, included in the collective exhibition “This Place” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016, shows their pensive and sometimes playful faces, a world away from war. Another photo shows a middle-aged man with a Star of David tattoo on an Israeli beach, looking proud but uneasy.
Her pictures from Israel were “arguably the most deeply human images in the show and perhaps the most traditional, reaching back to the work of Diane Arbus, Paul Strand and Eugène Atget,” the New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote.
Ms. Fox Solomon came to photography relatively late, around the age of 38, as the somewhat restless (by her own account) but socially conscious wife of a Jewish businessman in Chattanooga, Tenn. She had grown up in suburban Chicago and had known antisemitism as a child. And from her arrival in the South, in the early 1950s, she was aware of the inequities, racial and otherwise, around her.
Her husband’s family owned movie theaters, including a segregated one — her book “Liberty Theater” was an allusion to it. The nuanced view of Southern society that informs the book took shape during this period, as she suggested to an interviewer for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art in 2016. In Chattanooga, Black and white people lived in proximity to one another, as elsewhere in the South, and racism, as she saw it, was shaded, not monolithic.
“I knew that the people in Chicago, and the people that I knew in New York, they just had absolutely no connection in any way to African Americans,” Ms. Fox Solomon said. “And in Chattanooga there was more connection, or there was more possibility.”
In 1968, while visiting Japan, she found herself unable to communicate with the people she was staying with, and her Kodak Instamatic became “a way that I just could communicate with myself,” she told the interviewer.
It was an epiphany.
Ms. Fox Solomon came to realize that “something is different about me when I’m taking pictures,” she said. “I connect with something in myself that’s different than when I’m in social contact.”
What that something was, she didn’t specify. But she told the interviewer, “I always have tried as much as possible to connect my inner feelings to my pictures.”
Rosalind Fox was born on April 2, 1930, in Highland Park, Ill., to Vernon Fox, a businessman who worked in his family’s wholesale tobacco and candy enterprise, and Joelle Wellman Fox.
She attended Highland Park High School, graduating in 1947, and received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Goucher College in Baltimore in 1951.
Soon after, she met her husband, Joel W. Solomon, and they moved to Chattanooga, where she became the southern regional director of the Experiment in International Living, an exchange program for high school students.
It was after visiting Japan — in early 1972, the year after Arbus died by suicide — that she accompanied her husband on a business trip to New York. There, she met Ms. Model, a pioneer of street photography, who had immigrated to the U.S. in 1938.
Ms. Model was immediately impressed by the photographs Ms. Fox Solomon showed her. “She had a lot of confidence in me,” Ms. Fox Solomon told the Smithsonian interviewer.
Ms. Fox Solomon was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979, and she traveled to Guatemala, Peru, India, South Africa and elsewhere, photographing shamans, funerals, rituals and festivals.
Her work is in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and her “Portraits in the Time of AIDS,” a searing vision of patients and caretakers, was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
She had nearly 30 solo exhibitions, including the 1986 show “Rosalind Fox Solomon: Ritual,” at the Museum of Modern Art. And in 2019, she received a lifetime achievement award from the International Center of Photography.
Ms. Fox Solomon is survived by a daughter, Linda Solomon Wood; a son, Joel Solomon; and eight grandchildren. Her marriage to Mr. Solomon ended in divorce in 1984; thereafter, she lived in New York City.
After she returned from Japan, Ms. Fox Solomon’s life changed for good, as she told the Smithsonian: “I never stopped after that, 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.’”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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