‘The Depth Is in the Pictures'

Photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon has more stories to tell than she lets on.

- By Christopher Bonanos

ROSALIND FOX SOLOMON has rarely worked on assignment. When she first started taking photographs with an idea of making art, few would have expected her to turn that pursuit into a career; she was heading into her 40s with two children, a woman trying to figure out how to communicate as she hadn’t been able to before. She began by making work close to her home in Tennessee, but even after she gained some recognition and traveled farther afield, she didn’t exactly have a long-term plan: She would, she says, just decide to go somewhere—India, Guatemala, Missouri. She’d move around and look at people, engaging them but not saying much, and come back with pictures. That’s it. Did she think about what collectors or publishers or editors might want? “First of all, I’ve never been commercially viable,” she says now. “I never thought about that. Really, I just worked. Piled up my prints, year after year.”

We’re speaking in Washington Square on a perfect October day, a few blocks from the building where she’s lived since 1984, when she was 54 years old and recently divorced. She’s 91 now and hasn’t stopped working, spending the majority of her time these days collecting and editing her older work for publication. In October, Mack published