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.