“For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
Rosalind Fox Solomon got old. In A Woman I Once Knew, the photographer uses a series of self-portraits to record and share the process of aging, moving towards the predestined and inevitable.
A student of Lisette Model in the early 1970s, Solomon carved a reputation for her unflinching photography of everyday life. “I had made so many young people vulnerable,” she recalls. “I felt an obligation to make myself vulnerable.” So she turned the camera on herself, for five decades taking self-portraits. The series includes nudes that she would take all the way up until 2022.
The result is the autobiographical A Woman I Once Knew, which brings these self-portraits together alongside Solomon’s writing on her life, emotions and work.
“It is stunning to accept the immense change in a body that occurs over years,. I am unrecognisable to who I was as a young woman.”
– Rosalind Fox Solomon
“I remember the first one. It was me on the grass outside my Tennessee home at a time when I felt depressed. I think that in a number of them that I was depressed – I think maybe [the self-portraits] gave me some more connection to myself and reality.”
– Rosalind Fox Solomon
Why did I take pictures in the nude? It was like bearing my body and my soul,” she says. “I never thought I’d be showing them – it was never my intention when I was taking them.”
– Rosalind Fox Solomon
“They were always difficult times. I’m happy [now], this is a good period, my old age – I haven’t focused on my body recently, I’m probably just comfortable with who I am now.”
– Rosalind Fox Solomon
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