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Rosalind Solomon – Chapalingas
14 March – 9 June 2003
Raum 1, 2, 3
(Köln, Mediapark)
Im Mediapark 7, 50670 Köln
From an œuvre spanning more than 30 years which has taken her to many very different places around the world, Rosalind Solomon (b. 1930) has selected pictures which exemplify the various themes of her work and compiled them into a powerful ensemble under the title “Chapalingas”. For the sequences of the exhibition, which comprises a total of 140 photographs (also reproduced in the accompanying catalogue), Solomon has found visual associations which she sums up in terms such as “Body”, “Wheels”, “Ropes”, “Hearts” and “Play”: these function as a framework for the bringing-together of photographs taken at long intervals of time, without ultimately being dependent for their effect on specific temporal or geographical references. Even though her black-and-white pictures certainly do depict social events and human situations precisely, while also giving expression to her intense desire to seek for the truth, Solomon’s imagery is not the objective idiom of someone seeking merely to document what she sees. On the contrary, her critical, highly personal view of her motifs reveals visual worlds of suggestive, sometimes magic quality, which point to old and new myths and symbols of power, of gender, of faith, and of death, and, tell, in poetic form, of freedom and repression, and quite generally, of the human condition. Unembellished yet full of aesthetic power, her photographs reflected the facets of a global society long before the concept of the “global” was employed to define the market-economy and social-policy dimensions of worldwide communication. Whether Solomon is travelling in the southern states or in New York (she has lived in Manhattan since 1980), whether she is in Japan, India, Peru, South Africa, Ireland or Yugoslavia, she always finds a subject to obsess her, which she then uses to draw attention – in an intuitive and often disturbing way – to social problems and sensitive aspects of human behaviour. With a unique vision and intensive work, Rosalind Solomon has composed, over a period of several decades, an individual creation story in pictures, a photographic genesis, which understands beauty and brutality, harmony and fear, dream and reality as dual elements of one and the same existence.
The exhibition is accompanied by a trilingual book (German, English, French) of some 200 photographs and texts by Rosalind Solomon along with essays by Susanne Lange, Ingrid Sischy and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Steidl Verlag, Goettingen.
Photographies:
© Rosalind Solomon, New York
Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Im Mediapark 7, 50670 Cologne, Germany, Tel: 49- 221-226 5900, Fax: 49-221-226 5901, photographie@sk-kultur.de, www.photographie-sk-kultur.de
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