Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015
Judith Joy Ross: Photographs 1978–2015 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 Ross’s black-and-white, large-format portraits.
Published alongside the largest exhibition to feature Ross’s 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 1978–2015 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 Szarkowski's landmark 1990 MoMA survey, Photography until Now. Ross's 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).
