_{During the last five decades, Rosalind Fox Solomon has created a sweeping archive of black and white photographs illuminating the people she has encountered, both close to home and across the globe. One of Solomon’s earliest motifs, dolls and mannequins, represents an early fascination with the human likeness that the photographer has returned to throughout her career. The broken doll appears in early still lifes, and then reappears in later projects as dolls and stuffed toys coveted by children and held by the infirm. Solomon’s first photographs of dolls prefigure her portraits of hospital patients and persons living with AIDS made during the 1970s and 1980s, respectively, and they may be read as objects that simultaneously enact and symbolize caring. Collectively, these works affirm Solomon’s photographic practice as one of care.}

_{Rosalind Fox Solomon, who was born in 1930, did not begin photographing until she was in her late thirties. Living abroad near Tokyo at the time, she used a Kodak Instamatic and color slide film to better communicate with her Japanese hosts, as neither spoke the same language. Upon returning home to Chattanooga, Tennessee, she purchased a 35mm camera and built a darkroom. Thus began an artistic practice concerned with the lives of others.}

_{In the early 1970s, Rosalind Fox Solomon studied privately with photographer Lisette Model during occasional trips to New York City. Model, a legendary photographer in her own right who famously mentored Diane Arbus, Larry Fink, and Peter Hujar, told Solomon to “go for the strongest picture, not to be afraid because they were disturbing.” Solomon took Model’s advice to heart, resolving not to look away from difficult subjects, including racial oppression, the ravages of war, and epidemic illness. Under Model’s instruction, Solomon was unrestricted in her choice of subjects and encouraged to follow her intuition, meticulously edit her work, and hone her photographic craft. Solomon’s camera, utilized as an instrument of care, mirrors her own experience and has permitted her proximity to people living with AIDS, sick children, and ill adults. Her photographs do not look away from injury and trauma but rather embrace, with veracity, what each patient and their families face.}

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_{One portrait photograph depicts a young person, not yet twenty, wearing a hospital gown and tousled hair. The closely framed image lends a physical proximity and an intimacy to the scene. The banal pattern of the gown and the bright white blankness of the pillow reflect the institutional setting where the man rests. Against this background, however, the sitter’s several piercings and glossily painted fingernails reveal his individuality and youthful, queer style. At the center of the picture, just beneath the sitter’s chin, his smooth, slender hand gently grasps a well worn stuffed animal. His face, highlighted by the photographer’s flash, reflects a look of engagement, a return of the photographer’s gaze. Rosalind Fox Solomon has said, “When I photograph an individual, I want to connect with her or his interior. I’m not looking for the outer coating. I want a few moments when we stare into one another, exchanging our histories and feelings in a glance. Something in the way that a person looks at me is part of it, and I capture that. I want intensity. What I can project of myself—and what bounces back from the person I am facing—makes the picture. Sometimes it’s just a moment, a moment of connection.”}

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_{This photograph, taken by Rosalind Fox Solomon in 1987, depicts Bill Browning, a person living with AIDS during one of the most difficult and most deadly periods of the HIV and AIDS crisis in America. The subject is both a man and child, a strong and independent individual who is, at the same time, in need of care and love. Such is the complexity of humanity–and the power of the camera to describe it. Intent on photographing persons living with AIDS, Solomon was introduced to Jesuit priest and artist Father Bill McNichols, who invited Solomon to gather at a weekly dinner with his AIDS ministry community at Saint Peter’s in New York City. By the following year, Solomon had made 85 photographs of individuals living with AIDS as well as double and triple portraits with their loved ones. Solomon exhibited nearly 75 of them in “Portraits in the Time of AIDS,” curated by Thomas W. Sokolowski, at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in 1988.}

_{In her artist statement for “Portraits in the Time of AIDS,” Rosalind Fox Solomon writes of her intention to “reveal a special character, a relationship, an environment, aspects of the human struggle to survive.” However, despite the artist’s resolve to portray the humanity of the AIDS crisis, the exhibition was criticized for Solomon’s perceived exploitation of her subjects as victims. Certainly, many of the photographs are difficult for the viewer to face, as they detail the physical ailments associated with HIV. For Solomon, however, who initiated her portrait sessions by sharing conversations with her subjects, “There was little talk of death,” and she recalls that “the tone, the words were life.” Twenty-five years later, after exhibiting the work again, Holland Cotter contextualized the criticism of Solomon’s photographs in terms of the desire among political activism groups such as Act Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) to shift the public conversation from “abjection to agency, to the idea of people living with AIDS rather than dying from it.” Cotter points out that Act Up’s activism successfully altered the image of AIDS, and also that Solomon’s “unflinching” portraits register the social and visual realities that brought on the call for change.}

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‍_{Rosalind Fox Solomon’s AIDS portraits are indeed unflinching; at the same time, however, there is often a visible affection enacted between the person living with AIDS and their loved ones—a tenderness that plays out before Solomon’s lens. In one double-portrait, a man clasps the hand of his bed-bound companion, their bodies and their limbs seeming to draw the shape of a heart, a motif that occasionally appears in Solomon’s work, and one that, of course, visually inscribes love and care. In another double-portrait, a mother and her adult son embrace in a mouth-to-mouth kiss. And in another, a mother firmly presses her lips and arms around her adult son’s head. Each individual in the photographs enacts care for the other, and Solomon’s decision to highlight these human actions demonstrates her own capacity to participate in a discourse on caring through her photographs. As “Portraits in the Time of AIDS” illustrates, families are often present in Solomon’s photographs. In fact, the AIDS portraits continue a combination of motifs that appeared in her work previously: the preoccupation with illness and the family relations around it.}

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_{A decade before Rosalind Fox Solomon made portraits of people with AIDS and their families, she spent extensive time photographing patients at the Baroness Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee, during the mid-1970s. While Solomon’s husband received treatments there for his failing kidneys, Solomon arranged to photograph patients in the hospital under the condition that she first ask their permission. Solomon’s “Mother With Sick Baby” freezes a moment in which a mother lifts her infirm infant to her lips. She grips the child firmly and lovingly while the young one’s head falls backward limply. A dribble of saliva clings suspended to the baby’s delicate chin. She also met and photographed children through the vertical posts of their hospital cribs. The depiction of the hospital as prison has perhaps never been so lucid as in Solomon’s photographs framing solitary toddlers behind bars, images which bring to mind Lisette Model’s dictum: “Don’t shoot ‘till the subject hits you in the pit of your stomach.”}

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‍_{Although dolls appear in many of Rosalind Fox Solomon’s photographs throughout her practice, they are perhaps most resonant when they appear in the halls of Erlanger Hospital and in the hospitals, hospices, and homes in which people living with AIDS are pictured. In these contexts, the dolls manifest both need and care simultaneously. At Erlanger, Solomon found a certain kind of doll, known as “Resusci Anne” or “CPR Annie,” on which medical professionals practice their life saving capabilities. Solomon shows Anne folded over herself in a box, incapacitated. She wears the death mask of “L'inconnue de la Seine,” a woman who may have drowned in the Seine River in the late 19th century. This particular death mask has magnetized artists before Solomon, including the Surrealist photographer Man Ray who used this anonymous death mask as a motif for a series of portraits to accompany Louis Aragon’s novel Aurélien in 1966. But Anne is not an object of desire for Solomon, as are the disfigured dolls of Hans Bellmer. Solomon’s Annie is not the uncanny object of Surrealism; she is a simulacrum of human vulnerability.}

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_{Rosalind Fox Solomon’s photography of care began in an ordinary place, photographing battered dolls. During the years 1972 to 1976, Solomon frequented an open air market in Scottsboro, Alabama on the first Monday of each month, where she first encountered the disused dolls. Solomon’s earliest photographs of dolls and mannequins portray them up-close, revealing their worn-out and tattered faces and bodies. “Maybe the dolls expressed my feeling of just being a little broken,” Solomon has said. “I did a huge series on them—and then I started doing portraits. I started photographing dolls close up and I learned how to take pictures of people that way.” Not only did Solomon’s arranging and photographing the dolls serve as a rehearsal for the human faces and bodies she would encounter, they also foreshadow Solomon’s long standing compassion for her photographic subjects. Solomon’s dolls appear broken, battered, contorted, and sullied. In one sense the dolls represent the afflicted, but that is not all. They must be cared for. For what is a doll without its human counterpart? The photographer arranges their tender faces and bodies within the camera’s frame and in photographing them performs an act of care.}

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_{In her 2016 book Got To Go, Rosalind Fox Solomon presents a series of photographs interspersed with fragmented texts and disassembled song lyrics that may be read together as a psychological exploration of the artist’s formative years. “i love being taken care of” Solomon writes there. From Solomon’s early photographs of afflicted dolls and mannequins, to the later portraits of patients and families in Erlanger Hospital, and ultimately in the portraits of those living during the height of the AIDS pandemic, she has authored pictures that represent the ailing, the care they must be given, and what Solomon has described humans’ “struggle to survive.” Solomon’s empathetic photographs reveal this struggle—the simultaneous call to be cared for and to care for others.}

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