Rosalind Fox Solomon’s Introspective Portrait of Her Own Ageing Body

The first photograph in Rosalind Fox Solomon’s new book is a solarised image of the artist wearing a masquerade mask. It obscures almost her entire face – save for a big gaping smile. She can’t remember precisely where and when it was taken, but it was likely when she was living in Tennessee some five or so decades ago.

The 94-year-old has lived many lives; this was the start of a new one and was a fitting image to open her latest book, A Woman I Once Knew, which chronicles her journey via a series of intimate self-portraits and diary entries. “It’s really appropriate at the beginning of the book because it unmasks me in a way,” she says over the phone from her apartment in New York.

Throughout Solomon’s career, she’s travelled to India, Peru, South Africa, Cambodia and other far-flung destinations on assignment; she’s photographed those living with Aids in America and abroad. Her work is emotional, exploring race relations and religious practices, but also the simplicity – and complexity – of everyday life, capturing a slice of humanity that feels like it’s never been seen before. However, the same can be said for her raw, intimate and sometimes shocking nudes, the performative self-portraits and close-ups of her own body – rosy nipples, gentle folds of the stomach, torn toenails and bunions – that feature in her new book. A Woman I Once Knew is both an autobiography spanning image and text, and a universal commentary on the evolution of a woman’s body, mind and spirit.

Solomon grew up in Highland Park, Illinois in the 1930s, with a sociable family and outsider tendencies. “Mother wants me to be a well-rounded girl,” she writes. “But I am an oddball, too intense, too different. Later, she writes, “I dream of running away to live with the gypsies, but I don’t know where to find them.” Solomon wanted to be a writer when she was young, but as a teenager she abandoned this dream and decided to study political science at university, working with an organisation called the Experiment in International Living after she graduated. In 1953, in her early twenties, she married, had two children and moved to Chattanooga, TN. At age 38, the Experiment sent her on a trip to Japan, where she picked up a camera for the first time and her life as a photographer began. “I knew no Japanese and they knew little English. With an Instamatic camera as my companion, I took pictures as a means of communicating with myself,” she wrote. “The trip to Japan stirred up feelings I had not voiced. Alone with my camera, I began to express myself. I could not stop.”

Against the backdrop of second-wave feminism and her own divorce, Solomon continued to take pictures, sending her film off to New York to be developed. It was there that an agent suggested she study with Lisette Model, a well-known Austrian-American street photographer who taught Diane Arbus. Solomon continued to travel, often solo, which was not something many women did at the time. “When I traveled ... I was taken in. People helped me, strangers helped me, and that was really gratifying and affirming,” she says. “I peeled back the outer coatings of my being.”

At almost every age, no matter where she was in the world, Solomon would turn her camera on herself. There are photographs of her with a group of nuns that she fell in with in the Peruvian Andes, on a boat on the Ganges with her guide and posing in front of the New York subway. Solomon also photographed herself in private, holding an empty gilded frame up to her naked body or her clenched breast up to the camera; sitting nude in front of a photography screen on self-timer, lying in bed or in a cage. In some, her eyes are beckoning – commanding – while in others they’re vacant or sad. Her writing acts as a secondary medium to expose her innermost feelings. “I never thought of it as part of my practice,” Solomon says. “I often did it because I was disturbed about something. I did take a lot of them when I was feeling down, to tell you the truth. It was just a way of communicating with myself.”

It was also a way of processing her work, which was heavy in subject matter. From 1987 to 1988, Solomon documented the lives of men living with Aids on Long Island. She photographed her subjects alone, with their friends and family, and their lovers. “It was extremely difficult. I made friends with a number of the men, you know, it wasn’t all just professional. That was a series that really moved me. It was day and night. I couldn’t get it out of my head,” Solomon says. After she finished, she felt compelled to photograph herself on Jones Beach, walking into the waves. In one image, she’s standing underneath a lifeguard stand, imprisoned, while the murky water surrounds her. “It was some kind of expression related to that work.”

Less of a photo book but more of a visual autobiography, A Woman I Once Knew is published by Mack. The majority of the works are nude, but the photographer isn’t too worried about that. “I don’t have any compunction about them because I’m 94 years old. Maybe ten years ago, I couldn’t have done this book because I would have felt weird about exposing myself like that. But I know that I’m not going to live that much longer, you know?” she says. “I just don’t care.”

A Woman I Once Knew by Rosalind Fox Solomon is published by Mack, and is out now.