A Woman I Once Knew

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.