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June 20, 2011
I've only come across Rosalind Solomon's work courtesy of Wood S Lot. Prior to that this photographic artist was completely unknown to me. And to others it would seem.
Rosalind Solomon, An East Village Painter, New York, USA, Gelatin Silver Print
In this interview at American Suburban X Soloman mentions the negative responses to her work in a New York art world in the 1970s that was dominated by conceptualism.
She says:
I was floating around in my own juice. I had no regular gallery representation and no advisors. I did not have a clue as to how to get my work published and better known. I did not know how to talk about my work or to write about it. I always wanted to hold it tight and to keep my experiences and personal impulses private. I had many bodies of work that could have been books along the way and occasionally, I tried to find publishers, but I never wanted to stop photographing to promote my photography.
So she travelled to Guatemala, Peru, Nepal, South Africa and Poland using her Hasselbald and has published two books Chapalingas, which too two years to edit and Polish Shadow.
Rosalind Solomon, After 9/11, Self with frozen turkey, Macdowell, Peterborough, NH.
Now living and working in New York she says in this interview at 2point8 that:
The medium format camera satisfies me. It can be transported easily and is mechanically sound. My challenge is not format or color, but deepening my perception and range of ideas. I am interested in making expressive pictures. Black and white pictures work for me as poetry and metaphor in a way that color does not. I have tried color and I have tried digital. Neither gives me the sense of depth that I feel with black and white. Good images come slowly. 6 X 6 film is my “page”..
Like so many photographers working without the kind of champion that Dianne Arbus had in John Szarkowski at MOMA, Rosalind has pursued a relentlessly private vision, recognized by her colleagues but never achieving the public prominence that her work merits.
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