Rosalind Fox Solomon – Them (2014)

Rosalind Fox Solomon (1930-2025) was one of the most significant American photographers of the past half-century, celebrated for a body of work built around portraiture and an unflinching connection to human suffering, ritual, survival and struggle. In 2019 she received the International Center of Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Infinity Award. “Them” gathers a body of medium-format, black-and-white work shot with her characteristic sharp flash and rich tonal control, and stands as one of her most pointed and political projects.

The book grew out of “This Place,” a project that invited twelve internationally acclaimed photographers, including Josef Koudelka, Jeff Wall, Stephen Shore, Thomas Struth and Wendy Ewald, to explore the complexity of Israel and the West Bank, each through their own lens. Solomon spent five months there across 2010 and 2011, travelling by local bus through Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Nahariya, Bethlehem and Jenin. She photographed Jewish teenagers celebrating Purim, Christian pilgrims at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and Ghanaian worshippers at the Mount of Olives, building a cacophonous, interwoven sequence of faces and rituals from across the region’s fractured social landscape. Some images carry real political weight, among them a photograph of the casket of Juliano Mer-Khamis, a Palestinian-Israeli theatre director and activist who was assassinated during Solomon’s time in the territory. Throughout, the photographs are punctuated by fragments of her own journal entries, giving the sequence the feel of a personal, uneasy passage through the region rather than a detached survey.

The result is less a single argument than a collage of tensions: religion, ethnicity, memory and violence, all pressed up against one another without resolution. As Solomon herself put it, working on the project, she felt the tension of the place in every frame.

MACK, London, 2014. 165 x 215 mm. Hardcover, 144 pages. ISBN: 9781910164013

First edition. Condition: Like new.