In a room adorned with sympathetic black-and-white portraits for her retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, feebly gray-haired Judith Joy Roth recently photographed for her next series. was She poses as a security guard in front of her old-fashioned wooden view camera and continues her lewd monologue about her own incompetence.
As if talking to herself, she said: I forgot. “Then she looked up at the bald, bushy-bearded security guard standing obediently where she had put her. “Wow,” she exclaimed. “Anyone can tell that’s great. Great. You’re perfect.” He stared straight ahead.
Ross said to me: “People don’t like being photographed, but photographers don’t like being photographed either. All must be removed. And it may happen, it may happen. “
The moments she tries to capture are mystical. At least as strange is how she managed to find it so often. Portrait photographers usually want quality that can be described in one word. Julia Margaret Cameron wanted genius in men and beauty in women. August Sander revealed how the Germans followed their position in life and did not follow it. Diane Arbus exposed the subject’s deficiencies in self-expression. Ross takes a more passive stance. By belittling her own talents and showering her with compliments, she allows the sitter to fill the space with her interim personality. .
“Photography is a miracle,” said Joshua Chuang, an independent curator who curated the exhibition at the MAPFRE Foundation in Madrid, which runs until August 6. “It’s not that she controls the subject or the moment. With Judith, she surrenders completely to the moment until she forgets the technique.”
A large Deerdorf camera contributes to this magic. Technically, this would allow Ross to avoid using an enlarger and instead make her 8×10-inch contact her print that captures the finer details. Also, you can release the shutter without your face being hidden by the device. Less obvious, the view camera adds a sense of occasion to the act of being photographed. As she likes to put it, it feels like the circus has come to town. Her subjects are mostly of poor origin, and she is content with the attention she is not accustomed to.
“I don’t take pictures of people with money,” she said. “I don’t photograph people outside of what I consider my class. I probably don’t like them. And I don’t know them. These are the people I know.”
Perhaps her greatest achievement is the series of portraits she painted at the Maya Lin-designed Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which recently opened in Washington in 1983 and 1984. “I was going to go out and ask people stupid questions: How do you deal with pain and suffering,” she said. “Then I heard about the Vietnam memorial. I knew I could ask that question without words.”
Most of the American casualties of the war were borne by Roth’s favorite picture of the working class and lower middle class. Her portraits of solemn visitors steeped in quiet emotion constitute monuments as simple and pathetic as the monuments they were visiting. In 1984, Ross was briefly banned from photographing there, but she returned to Pennsylvania to continue the project in front of the Passmark store in Allentown. “I searched for pain and suffering in the local sleazy mall,” she said. “It exists everywhere. The pictures I took there are about Vietnam.”
Ross, 76, lives modestly in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, near Hazleton, the depressed mining town where she grew up. She is the middle child of three children raised by her father and mother, who run a small 50-yen store chain. who taught piano. She developed her lifelong love for classical music and the natural world from her parents.
I fell in love with photography as a scholarship student at the Moores College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, and after earning a degree in art education, I enrolled in graduate courses at the Institute of Design in Chicago. She felt so alienated in her early years that she was often unable to photograph people head-on. “I spent all day in the cinema and I could see people’s backs,” she said, explaining how she pointed the lens at the back of people’s heads. In 1972, she secured her part-time job teaching photography at the Moravian University in Bethlehem. After that, she spent several years cleaning the house and supporting herself.
A turning point in Ross’ career came after his father died in the spring of 1981. She was so depressed that she went that summer to a swimming pool at Eurana Park in Weatherly, Pennsylvania, a few miles from the Rockport creekside cabin where the Ross family lived. She spent summers during her childhood and visited this park on her memorable occasions.
Now she took pictures of the teens there. “It was about reconnecting with her life,” said curator Susan Kismalik, who has been close to Ross since meeting her in the mid-1980s while working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Her pictures were amazing and helped her understand something about her life.”
The following summer, Ross returned to Eurana Park with her newly acquired 8 x 10-inch Deerdorf View camera and took a series of photographs that would define her artistic style. (She is now using a replacement camera, but it broke from overuse.)
Photos from Yurana Park convey the clumsiness and insecurity of young people. The popsicles about to melt in the hands of her three girls in bathing suits—two staring at the camera, one looking away—represent the transience of the last few years. makes it stand out. In many portraits, the teens appear pensive and stare into the middle distance. Ross focused the camera with a shallow depth of field, rendering the subject crisp and sharp against a background of trees and water that was barely perceptible. She imbued her images with a warm, old-fashioned glow by applying gold-tone prints on light-sensitive gelatin silver chloride printout paper. The 1993 photo of first graders taking a nap in a classroom may have been produced by Louis Hein nearly a century ago.
Usually, I didn’t care about the exhibition, and I left the prints in a storage box. “Prints are very important to her,” said curator Chuan. “She doesn’t have children. She’s attractive, but she’s socially awkward and she doesn’t get along very well. Her prints became a connection between her and people.”
They commemorate their encounters in pictures – always meeting strangers. “I feel a very strong connection with someone I photographed, but I can’t do that with someone I know,” she explained. “I’m self-conscious.” Aside from interacting with people, Ross typically takes daily walks along the banks of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers to experience nature off-camera. “I don’t think she’s ever taken a picture of a plant,” she told me with a little exaggeration. “I try to give up quickly.”
Ross likes working on series. She has been photographing her students in her hometown of Hazleton. People in various jobs in eastern Pennsylvania. A youth (mainly African American) of northeastern Philadelphia. A young man from Easton, Pennsylvania. A political operative in charge of elections. Visitors visit an observatory in New Jersey to gaze at the destroyed New York skyline after the September 11 attacks. For a rare perspective on those in power, she was commissioned in 1986 and 1987 to photograph US Senators and Representatives and their staff. She vehemently avoided taking promotional photos that elected officials would normally send to voters. “I usually end up liking people even if I don’t like them,” she said. “We are all vulnerable. That’s what these photos are about.”
After her favorite printout paper (which was popular in the 19th century and allowed images to be produced in sunlight rather than in a darkroom) became unavailable, she tried color photography, which cost a lot of money. I gave up on it because it was too expensive. Format color film. Some of the examples in the exhibition are interesting, but most of this work, along with thousands of other prints in the Roth archives, have yet to be seen.
Ross is no longer affiliated with an American gallery. “I think she’s upset that her work isn’t selling,” Chuan said. “Her various dealers took issue with the fact that people didn’t want pictures of the public.”
Ross cited a series of demeaning complaints, including double vision, memory loss and a tic that developed in middle age. At one point I asked what I thought was a harmless question. Just a follow up to what she told me earlier. “Are all your pictures depicting how people deal with pain and suffering?” she was at a loss for words. Her face froze. After a few seconds she spoke. “I have a tic,” she told me. “She must have said something.” I realized I had done something she would never do. A direct question nailed her to the wall. By standing up instead of backing down, I removed the space for her to say who she was.
