Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 19782015
By (Author) Judith Joy Ross
Edited by Joshua Chuang
Text by Svetlana Alpers
Text by Addison Bross
Text by Joshua Chuang
Contributions by Adam Ryan
Aperture
Aperture
1st July 2022
United States
General
Non Fiction
Exhibition catalogues and specific collections
Photography: portraits and self-portraiture
779.2092
Winner of Charles Pratt Memorial Award 1992
Hardback
312
Width 240mm, Height 280mm, Spine 25mm
1769g
Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 19782015 is an illuminating retrospective that explores the life and career of a revered American photographer, illustrated by two hundred of her images, many never before seen or published.
The work of Judith Joy Ross marks a watershed in the lineage of the photographic portrait. Her pictures unpretentious, quietly penetrating, startling in their transparency consistently achieve the capacity to glimpse the past, present, and perhaps even the future of the individuals who stand before her lens. Adolescents swim at a local municipal park, ordinary people are at work and play. From immigrants and refugees, to tech workers and students, military reservists and civilians all are incisively rendered with equal tenderness in Rosss black-and-white, large-format portraits.
Published alongside the largest exhibition to feature Rosss work to date, and drawn from her extensive archive of photographs made over the span of more than thirty-five years, Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 19782015 encompasses the best work of this influential photographer.
Judith Joy Ross (born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 1946) studied photography under Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago in the 1960s. Her work was first acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1984, and was included in John Szarkowskis landmark 1990 MoMA survey, Photography until Now. Rosss work is now held in public and private collections around the world, and she has received numerous awards, including the 2017 Lucie Award for Achievement in Portraiture. She has published seven monographs. Joshua Chuang is the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Associate Director for Art, Prints and Photographs and Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography at the New York Public Library. Among the exhibitions and publications he has organized are Robert Adams: The Place We Live (2010), Blue Prints: The Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins (2018), and Santu Mofokeng: Stories (2019). Svetlana Alpers is an art historian, professor, writer, and critic. Her specialty is Dutch Golden Age painting, and she is author of the 1983 book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Alpers has also written on Pieter Bruegel, Peter Paul Rubens, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Diego Velzquez, among others. Addison Bross is a scholar, writer, and professor emeritus of English at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.