In defiance of this mantra, Fox Solomon lets the self-portraits in her book starkly convey the brutality of aging. Her pictures, many of them nude, feature open sores, shattered nails, and bones jutting out of feet almost to the point of pushing through the skin. These are not the images her mother would have approved of, nor do they follow in the traditional mold of the nude in art history. Where Ingres, Botticelli, and Titian sought to create an elongated and elegant form, Fox Solomon crouches, bends, and stares at the viewer. In one image, she hangs a picture frame around her torso, so that her breasts and genitals are encased in a gilded rectangle.
The text in “A Woman I Once Knew” proceeds more or less chronologically through Fox Solomon’s life, but the photographs, which are undated and uncaptioned, are time travellers. Wedged between a series of chiaroscuro nude portraits from middle age, Fox Solomon writes of her teen-age years and early adulthood. After graduating from college, she met Joel (Jay) Solomon, a politically connected Southerner who would go on to work with the Carter Administration, and, she writes, “we both felt waves of romantic bliss.” Love came with concession, though, as Jay did not want Fox Solomon to continue working when they relocated to his native Chattanooga, Tennessee. Six weeks after their honeymoon, she underwent surgery to remove uterine fibroids so that she could get pregnant; conducted by Jay’s cousin, the operation left her with a thin, serpentine scar up her abdomen that is visible in many of her photographs. “By the time I was twenty five,” she writes in the book, “he had sliced open my stomach twice again,” in two C-section operations during the births of the Solomons’ children, Joel and Linda.
Rosalind Fox was by then Rosalind Fox Solomon, and, like the woman in “The Years,” she was beginning her evanescence. Perhaps in an effort to stop herself from fading away completely, she began taking photographs—some of herself, some of other people. What began as an avocation turned into a serious occupation, as Fox Solomon turned to documenting the remnants of segregation visible in Chattanooga and across the South. She studied under the humanist photographer Lisette Model, who taught her, Fox Solomon writes, “to reach the raw, receptive state which could lead me to passionate connections.”
