Judith Joy Ross.
Photographs since 1982

An exhibition by Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne, in collaboration with the artist

The American photographer Judith Joy Ross (*1946) shows us psychologically sensitive portraits of people that demonstrate individuality as well as a broad spectrum of emotional states and physiognomies: portraits taken of children during recreation or at school, adolescents about to enter adulthood, people involved in political issues, the Vietnam War or current military conflicts, men and women at work, serving as volunteers, or in their role as parents. She encounters individuals with great openness and respect, seeking them out in everyday situations far from ideals of beauty and media clichés. To her, the municipal park, the playground, the supermarket, the neighborhood streets, or the polling station are welcome sites for her photographs. Then it is the specific presence, the moment of making contact, that fascinate Judith Joy Ross and in which she takes pleasure. The camera affects her own perception like a clarifying filter: when she was once asked about the recipe for her photographs, she replied that she sees herself less as the author of the images and more as someone who communicates a situation that was experienced collectively. The artist prefers to pursue her work in series developed over the long term that address different groups of people and social backgrounds.

The photographer uses a large-format camera and a tripod. Awkward to handle, it requires concentration and patience, yet it results in consciously balanced and delicately defined photographs of great materiality. Judith Joy Ross prepares them as contact sheets of 8-x-10-inch negatives on printing-out paper with gold toning, and they exhibit highly differentiated shades of gray. In doing so, the artist takes up a method from the early days of photography, transports it into the present, and emphatically confronts us with the magic of a medium that records reality.

Judith Joy Ross began studying at the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia in 1966 and transferred in 1968 to the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where she also attended classes taught by Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siegel. Yet independent of her period of training, she sees her work as an artist beginning with the series Eurana Park, Weatherly, Pennsylvania, in 1982. It was in particular children and adolescents who attracted her attention. The vulnerability of the children, their uninhibitedness, and their feeling of security among their circle of friends become evident in this series, as does the difficult period of transition into adulthood. In this series the photographer already begins to address aspects that she would again take up later and vary.

An important series that directly succeeded Eurana Park is Portraits at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, taken in 1983 and 1984 in Washington, D.C. On the grounds of the newly erected memorial to fallen and missing soldiers, Judith Joy Ross used her camera to pursue what for her was the most central question of all: “How do people deal with sorrow and pain?” What resulted are photographs that show very different reactions; the facial expressions of the visitors to the memorial alternate between irritation, insight, and deep consternation.

The series Portraits of the U.S. Congress from 1986/87, U.S. Army Reserve from 1990, Elections from 1996 to 2010, as well as the more recent series Protest the War from 2006/07 once more underscore the critical and political dimension of the work by Judith Joy Ross. In each series, the debate over the relationship between institutionalized politics and the individual citizen constitutes the background, if under different thematic circumstances. In her portraits of members of congress or their staff members, which she took in their offices in Washington, she takes a look behind the façade of big politics.

Ross’s work is generally associated with her deep concern for the current events taking place around her. This is brought to bear in the series Pathmark, Allentown, 1984, Easton, 1988, Northeast Philadelphia, 1998 und Freeland, 2004. While the occasion for producing them may have originally been a different one, these are groups of work that all feature people who stem from unpretentious life contexts far from the American dream and who normally receive little attention.

On the scent of the meaningfulness of life, Judith Joy Ross also takes pictures of people in their everyday working lives, such as in the series Jobs from 1990, or connoted differently with an eye toward recreation and membership in certain groups in the series Baseball, 1989–91, and Church People, 2005/06. She repeatedly deals with questions related to interpersonal relations, responsibility, and identity and its opportunities to develop.

Since the 1980s, the photographer has time and again dealt with motifs from nature, for example in her portraits of individual trees or tree and landscape formations. Her most recent works also examine people’s relationship to their environment, in particular to animals. Here, Ross’s pictures inquire into correlations and processes of adjustment, seek natural developments and artificial interventions in them, as well as balanced, decent ways of life.

Judith Joy Ross’s photographic oeuvre closely corresponds to her interest in the history of art and photography. Her photos, bound to a documentary style, are not only related to Walker Evans in terms of method, but he is also her indirect companion for having taken some of his most famous photographs in 1935 in Bethlehem, Ross’s hometown. Works like those taken by Eugène Atget or Lewis Hine are just as important to her as those of the German photographer August Sander, whose People in the 20th Century inspired her early on.

The retrospective assembled by Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur in collaboration with Judith Joy Ross presents about 150 select examples from around 20 series produced over the course of the last 30 years. It is the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date, and it contains both well-known photographs as well as some that have never before been shown or published. In 2012, the exhibition will be presented at the Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frau Magdeburg and at the Fondation A Stichting in Brussels. The Schirmer/Mosel Verlag is publishing a catalog, edited by Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne. Ross’s work is represented by the Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and by the Sabine Schmidt Galerie in Cologne.

On Monday, September 26, at 7:00 p.m., Judith Joy Ross is holding a lecture on her photographic work in cooperation with the Amerika Haus e. V. NRW (location: hall on the 1st floor, Im Mediapark 7, Cologne).

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