(OD) Rosalind Solomon: Ritual
Posted on May 23, 2010 | No Comments
Rosalind Solomon’s new exhibition, Ritual, opened recently at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery, and her video, A Woman I Once Knew, is being screened at Silverstein’s 20th street space on Saturdays during May and June. This fruitful pairing returns to the theme of ritual activities – personal, religious, political, ceremonial – that Rosalind explored in her one-person show of the same title at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1986. As might be expected of an artist celebrating her 80th birthday this year, her new exhibition may be viewed as a re-appraisal of the earlier one, and will be of particular interest to those who know her work well.
A few nights before the opening, Rosalind and I attended a concert by friends of hers who were performing at the Jazz Standard. It was a lovely spring evening, and while waiting for the band to perform we spoke about the feature on her work in the New York Times “Lens” blog, Rosalind Solomon’s Singular Journey. It must be a curious feeling, I wondered, after a successful career of more than forty years, to be introduced as “one of the most interesting photographers you’ve never heard of.” And yet, as is hinted at in Susana Raab’s thoughtful article, Rosalind began that career at a time when the field of fine-art photography was dominated by a small group of powerful institutional figures. Chief among these was John Szarkowski, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, whose attention Rosalind sought by inviting him to lunch. As Raab relates in her description of Solomon’s early years, although Szarkowski “found her work intriguing … he encouraged her not to show [it] too soon for fear of comparisons to Diane Arbus.” Like so many photographers working without the kind of champion that Arbus had in Szarkowski, Rosalind has pursued a relentlessly private vision, recognized by her colleagues but never achieving the public prominence that her work merits.
For Szarkowski, apparently, there was insufficient room in the clubhouse for more than one strong woman photographer. It’s difficult to imagine him giving the same advice to any of the several male photographers whose careers he supported, for example Lee Friedlander or Gary Winogrand, among whom professional rivalry and competition would have been regarded as both sporting and appropriate. Nevertheless, Szarkowski’s premonition was correct; the comparison with Arbus has haunted Rosalind’s career. It is a comparison, she told me, that she hopes her current exhibition will finally dispel through the range and strength of the images presented.
There is, however, a certain paucity to the medium of photography, and even more so its modes of distribution, which makes such comparisons almost inevitable. The palette of the professional photographer is represented to the public through a limited set of technical choices: of camera (small, medium, or large format), film (fast or slow; black and white or color), and lighting (natural or strobe). The photographer may find, within these choices, opportunities for endless experiment and variation in the field, studio, and darkroom. For the viewer, however, the experience of looking at photographs is invariably subject to the constraints of his or her particular mode of encounter with them, usually on the walls of a gallery or in the pages of a book. In either setting, a further reduction of the photographer’s vision according to an arbitrary set of mechanical standards – print and frame size in the gallery; page size and ink tone in books – is required. Given such constraints upon the viewing experience, the physical similarities between works by Solomon and Arbus must appear both self-evident and meaningful: both employ a medium format camera, fast black and white film, and strobe to capture and accentuate detail in their comparably sized prints.
Moreover, Solomon’s and Arbus’ personal histories – the fact that both studied with Lisette Model, for example – and their shared inclination towards intimate and often disturbing subject matter, would seem to affirm whatever a comparison of the physical similarities in their work has already established. Indeed, as Raab notes in her article, “Ms. Solomon acknowledges a debt to Arbus, who showed her the virtues of the square format and the use of strobe to capture moments which would otherwise be lost. Both produced bodies of work that focus on humanity and are devoid of nostalgia and cliché.” Consider this description a second time, however, and its list of technical and aesthetic choices could as easily be applied to any number of photographers, male or female. An obligatory acknowledgment of Arbus’ influence is not required of Bruce Gilden or Nan Goldin every time they open an exhibition, for example, nor would it be overly useful in helping viewers to appreciate their equally provocative and disturbing photographs.
Rosalind Solomon has lived a much longer life than Arbus did, and her work has grown deeper – richer and more complex – in the years since her meeting with John Szarkowsi. But the acknowledgment of that growth and richness is lost in the comparison with Arbus, because it is an assessment of her originality in relation to another artist rather than of the quality of her work as a whole. That is quite different from what we encounter in comparisons between male photographers, such as Evans and Frank or Avedon and Penn, where the resonances of influence are acknowledged without any reduction of respect to the originality of the individual artists. In comparisons between women photographers such as Solomon and Arbus, influence is too often equated with imitation. This is also true in comparisons between women and men photographers. Inge Morath, for example, has been described as a lesser Cartier-Bresson, despite the fact that she never worked in singular images, as he did. The comparison denies Morath the nearly fifty year long career of narrative photojournalism that followed her two years of work as HCB’s assistant. On closer scrutiny, Morath, like Solomon, turns out to be yet another of “the most interesting photographers you’ve never heard of.”
Such comparisons persist, not on behalf of the artist or viewer, but because they are useful to the same powerful institutions that defined the field at the outset of Rosalind’s career, which remain deeply committed to re-telling the stories of such mythical figures as Szarkowski, Arbus, and Cartier-Bresson. Within this context, the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of her work in 1986 may be seen as functioning simultaneously as a confirmation of Rosalind’s career and as a re-confirmation of its own earlier discovery of Arbus. While annoying to Solomon to the extent that it denies the artist her own myth of creative originality, the pedigree “MoMA > Arbus > Solomon” is none too shabby, and so it has been reiterated in countless smaller and larger exhibitions since the 1986 presentation of Ritual. By contrast, the brilliance of her new exhibition of the same name is that its organizers have started from precisely the same point as those of the MoMA show – same artist, same theme – but arrived at an altogether different conclusion – different images, different narrative.
One might consider this counter-intuitive in a commercial gallery, where pedigree is a prerequisite for sales, and that Silverstein should have been content to toe the line of the earlier exhibition. Instead, the gallery has used the “nearly 25th” anniversary of Ritual and Rosalind’s 80th birthday as an opportunity to re-cast both her work and her story into the present, presenting her as a mature artist in relation to the larger field and practice of photography. Representing both the scope of Rosalind’s career and the range of her travels, most of the photographs selected by Silverstein are nevertheless presented for the first time here. Considerable digging in the archive has yielded an almost entirely new rendition of the theme in pictures that are as exciting as they are unfamiliar, deepening and strengthening our knowledge of both the artist and of the larger body of work to which they belong.
More crucially, Silverstein’s selection and the hanging of the exhibition have brought to the foreground the artistic self-consciousness that has always distinguished Rosalind’s photography from purely documentary work, and that also separates her from Arbus. Sensitively grouped into small grids, the photographs connect; sometimes by subject and other times by gesture or a common visual motif, but always by reference back to their maker. In Silverstein’s Ritual, the invisible photographer is made present and primary through the exhibition’s focus on the remarkable consistency of her eye and her project.
Jeff Rosenheim, curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described that project best when he wrote that “It would not be wrong to assert that for Solomon, every portrait is truly a self-portrait, a test of the self against another self.” There are, in other words, no objective pictures here. This fact is underscored by Rosalind’s video, A Woman I Once Knew, which moves between scenes of her naked and trapped in a cage, dancing alone at home, and traveling by boat and rickshaw in India, all to a score of chanted words such as “have to go/don’t know where to go,” “invasion/spy cameras,” and “flashing lights/secret prison,” etc. There is a sense in this work of the artist having gotten too close to her subject, which is, in the end, herself. As such, Rosalind’s video is the perfect counterpoint to her photographs. In it, she brings home the theme of ritual and then, by turning the camera inward and on herself, exposes the dark and often destructive impacts of a lifetime of creative work.
I no longer remember how or exactly when I met Rosalind, but going to work as her secretary/assistant was my first job in photography after I graduated from college. It must have been in 1985, because I remember that my first phone calls were to Jane Livingston, following up after Rosalind’s exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery, and to Peter Galassi, in anticipation of her show at MoMA. The job didn’t last long because during that same year I received my first of many travel grants from the Soros Foundation, which enabled me to travel twice each year, for two months at a time, to work with artists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. I wasn’t of much use to Rosalind once I was on the road as often as she was, but as a consequence of my travels I came to regard her as a kindred spirit, with whom I shared the experience of a complicated dual life at home and abroad. As a wife and mother turned artist, Rosalind was negotiating the demands of a life lived multiply well before I met her, and also well before she began to travel and to work extensively outside the US. She had long since jettisoned any notion of safety, having left behind all the securities of that earlier life when she re-located to New York to pursue her photography.
In 2003, Rosalind wrote, “Being in difficult places strips me down and reduces things to the essential. It keeps me completely focused on my work and the reasons why I am there. … I feel a productivity in isolation from my own culture. Each day is structured. I am completely myself doing something that matters to me.” Thus, for her, the difficulties of movement and of communicating between one life and another – one place and another, one practice and another – were a kind of motivation; to see, to show, and to speak powerfully about the world and herself, whatever the cost. If her pictures are sometimes shocking it is not only because she is showing her viewers things that we might prefer not to see. Rather, and more powerfully, we are shocked by her extreme physical proximity to her subjects, as a result of which we feel her intimacy and sense her danger. There is no zone of safety in this work, for artist or for viewer; there is no comfort. And yet, precisely because of the work’s extreme intimacy, the degree to which she enters into her subjects’ lives rather than documenting from the periphery, there is also tenderness and beauty in it. That is the dual gift of Rosalind’s photography; its demanding generosity.
Much less sparing and far less kind are Rosalind’s self-portraits, which have occupied her off and on, especially during periods between travel, and of which A Woman I Once Knew is a recent example. In it, Rosalind exposes the insecurities of the aging artist, no longer confident of the mental and physical exertions required in her earlier work. Here, the body is the key, with all its beauty and frailty. Alongside images of fear and loss, however, this work also delivers a bemused sense of hope in the sequence of Rosalind dancing and lifting weights in her in her underwear, at war against the inevitable. “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” she repeats in the final frames. The woman she once knew was one who had been traumatized by, but is ultimately delivered through, the disparate experiences experiences and encounters of her life. If, as Rosenheim writes, all Rosalind’s portraits are self-portraits, then the pairing of her video self-portrait with her photographs in Ritual makes perfect sense of the work. It yields, at last, a more complete and perfect picture of the artist.
=====
All photographs © Rosalind Solomon, courtesy of the Bruce Silverstein Gallery.
Print This Post
Comments
Leave a Reply