But photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon has more stories to tell than she lets on.
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Rosalind Fox Solomonhas almost never worked on assignment.
She started out shooting close to her home in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Did she think about what collectors or publishers or editors might want, the way so many photographers do?
First of all, Ive never been commercially viable, Fox Solomon says now.
I never thought about that.
Really, I just worked.
Piled up my prints, year after year.
This is a belly dancer.
And hespushingmoney onto her face.
In Guatemala in 1992, two people lie in a roadside ditch as their child watches over them.
Was someone hit by a car?
No, she replies.
Oh, what a mess.
And the child would have to sit there until they slept it off because they werent near home.
She kneweverythingabout all the politicians.
Its difficult to slot Fox Solomons work into a photographic niche.
Theyre about who the subjects think they are as much as whowesee them as.
The psychological layering is conflicted and oblique.
The depth is in the pictures, not what I say about them, Fox Solomon says.
She was completely different, and we never understood her.
After college, she says, I wasnt that confident, and I was … kinda lost.
She got a couple of jobs and traveled withthe Experiment in International Living, the summer-abroad organizers.
And my husband said, No wife of mine is ever going to work.
Im not kidding you.
She took guitar lessons to take a stab at shake off the ennui, and rode horseback every week.
In 1968, something snapped in her.
After the King and Kennedy assassinations, she gave up her activist work, depressed.
I turned inward, she says.
She also started taking pictures, first with a camera she bought for a cultural-exchange trip to Japan.
Gradually she migrated from the dolls to portraits of the sellers and their customers.
In an attempt to fit in when she visited, she tied on a frilly poke bonnet.
(Obviously they knew I wasnt a farmer, she says now.)
Model told her to bring everything youve ever done.
At midnight, we were both exhausted, and she said, Yes, I will take you on.
She had lessons with Model a few times a year on those trips to New York.
(Her children were teenagers by this time.)
The work was demanding, and not just because Model was a drill sergeant.
Model ordered Fox Solomon around as she worked:Do it from below.
Do it from the side.
Another time, she photographed Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia, before he was president.
My son kept telling me, Mother, you should be photographing Jimmy Carter.
One of them ison the jacket of Kai Birds new Carter biography.
(Fox Solomons husband would later work for the president, as head of the General Services Administration.)
Your associations are not as broad as they should be.
Because I still lived there, you know?
She began to show her work, first in a group exhibition in Chattanooga.
A series she did in Israel, titled Roses and Radishes, traveled to several American synagogues in 1974.
Im always thinking,Who is this person?
What does this person think about and feel?
I dont intimidate people I just look like a kooky old lady, she says.
They just didnt get me, she says of her family.
I was very serious as a child, and I felt very rejected.
Well, the book is calledThe Forgotten, so …Yeah.
You know, Ive never said it, but Ive thought about that.
Although Fox Solomon has been shooting less lately, she does still get out there.
She does a little time on a stationary bike, stretches, some other low-impact stuff.
If youre like this she looks at the sidewalk in the middle distance you dont feel as good.
And then you lift your head like this she raises her chin and stands taller you feel better.
Her pace quickens as she heads for home.
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