I made the nude self-portraits at times when I was feeling vulnerable. I never planned to publish them. At a certain point I asked myself, why not?
– Rosalind Fox Solomon
Rosalind Fox Solomon’s nudes portray a particular woman, and her experience of her body. These self-portraits stun with their unexpected compositions – a body posed in unlovely and awkward postures. Idiosyncratic images collide with historical and traditional representations of female nudes.
Fox Solomon’s self-portraits work toward upending the seminal critique that, in cinema, ‘woman [is the] object of the male gaze’, Laura Mulvey’s theory that appeared in her 1973 essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Mulvey proposed that onscreen women were subjected and subjugated to the male eye, objectified to satisfy his desire. Yet, an audience of others – gay men and women, straight women – see with their own eyes.
Fox Solomon took up a camera when she was forty, studied with Lisette Model, and found an abiding interest and pleasure in making photographs. From the start, she contemplated and investigated the problems that come with directing a camera at people of various backgrounds and points of view. She brought to photography her previous and prevailing interests – family and other relationships, social and cultural differences, and, in a sense, turned into an artist of ethnographic persuasion.
Photography revolutionized how she lived. Drawn to picturing other lives, she pursued projects in Peru, Mexico, South Africa, and in New York City and the American South; she sought permission in photographing people, proposing a kind of collaboration by asking her subjects to choose how they wanted to be seen. Behind her camera, Fox Solomon, who was a shy person, now engaged with strangers, new and different kinds of people.
In photographing her nude self, Fox Solomon is no stranger to controversial subjects. With the advent of the Aids epidemic in the US, experienced first in NYC, people – generations who had seen polio cured and relied on penicillin – were overwhelmed and horrified, while gay men and women with Aids were further stigmatized. PrEP has eliminated the fear of getting Aids, for those who have access to it, but has not cured it.
During the scourge, Fox Solomon photographed people with Aids, spending time with them, often becoming friends. Her 1987–88 exhibition, Portraits in the Time of AIDS, at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, was revelatory and controversial: photographs of men, mostly, their bodies scarred, a face covered by Kaposi’s sarcoma, a wasting body lying in a hospital bed, a friend or family member at the bedside. The love and affection shown in those photographs rebuked those who would not even touch people with Aids.
Some reviewers and the public objected to the display of these troubling images – infected bodies. But showing humanity is primary for Fox Solomon.
Fox Solomon shot these photographs over fifty years. In this series, she declares her independence as a woman, and as a photographer. The first photograph here shows her seated on a stool, her legs spread out – woman-splaining, I could say now. Her hands lie on her knees, but not in a restful manner – one hand forms a fist. She wears plain black pants and top, and running shoes. It is night, and behind her a black sky and large, screened windows frame her. Not looking at the camera, her face is turned slightly; she might be thinking or looking off into space, her white hair creating another frame inside that of the night sky.
The composition of the space is plain, unadorned, a few objects in it. Her figure is somewhat off-center, one of her knees bent toward the door, perhaps. The running shoe is angled, intimating that this woman may want to run away, out of the picture. The self-portrait is far from still, and far from the usual representations of women: she is uneasy, restless, not making up a face for the camera.
Several nudes – in fact all of them – object to the familiar approaches. Fox Solomon is lying on her side on a wooden floor. Her left hip, in the forefront, seems to guard the body from complete vision. Her raised left arm partially covers one breast, her hand fully covers one eye. Much of her body lies in shadow.
A covered eye incites several interpretations. You can look at me, but not see me completely, since looking is not seeing. Another: you can’t see me, and anyway I am hiding from myself. The covered eye is a pun.
In another, Fox Solomon is seated, perhaps in an imperfect yoga pose. Her legs are crossed awkwardly, one knee up, the other under it, while she grasps the foot of the raised leg. Her head juts forward, her dark eyes hooded, again playing with sight. Her nude body is effectively not available, her breasts, her genitals covered. The pose depicts ambivalence, especially to ‘performing’ nudity.
A photograph of hands is an artistic trope, the hands that create work, Michelangelo’s finger reaching for God. Fox Solomon’s version does not aggrandize hers; instead, they seem unheimlich.
The index finger of one points to the other hand, where four fingers are visible. A curious image, the four long fingers stretched out and flat. I spot a wound on that index finger, a detail mostly absent from pictures unless depicting the hands of workers. Behind her, a cross-hatched wall imitates the position of the crossed hands.
Her pose in another picture resembles an odalisque, but her look disarms the spectator. Her body is foreshortened, legs cut off after the thighs. Not fully supine on what seems like a bed, her body is angled, only one breast visible.
Her eyes look out of the frame and disrupt the viewer’s gaze. Her face is accentuated by the V of one arm, which mimes the shape of her chin, emphasizing it. Eyes will find her eyes and, with her enigmatic, grave expression, lips closed, she frustrates satisfaction – for whose pleasure has she shot this? Her look claims her body for herself.
Fox Solomon hides as she exposes: her photographs insist that exposing is not revealing. The self-portraits demonstrate interiority, an effect in a photograph or movie that is particularly elusive. A subject’s demeanor and visage can suggest thoughtfulness, melancholia, contentment, and so on. There may be nothing behind their expression.
Harry Mathews once commented, ‘The writer is their own first reader.’ Here, Fox Solomon is her own life model. But no artist who is a woman can escape the criticism that photographing herself is narcissistic. Men who do it – for example, John Coplans – won’t be. Oh, that silly double standard. Fox Solomon says that she shot the nudes ‘when she was feeling vulnerable’. It seems counterintuitive to bring herself forward, then, unless you understand it as resistance, an act against retreating from the world, forcing herself to face the world even then.
Her intent is different. The sculptural aspect of her nudes makes her body appear solid. Those unusual poses, hands and legs, focus attention on her physicality. These are not gentle, passive female bodies. They are strong women who strike poses that show aggression. And in the very last image of this photoessay, Fox Solomon wears a black bra and high black socks, she is crouched over, her hands in fists. Her determination to exist is powerful.
