'DON'T MOVE'
Photographer Judith Joy Ross walks our features reporter and photo editor through her Philadelphia Museum of Art retrospective.
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At the entrance to the new Judith Joy Ross exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is a placeholder, a blow up of one of her most intimate portraits, a woman named Celia.
Hazleton-born Ross, 77, gets why it’s on the poster.
“Because it’s f—ing inviting.” she said. “You want to go in there. Don’t you want to know about her?”
Features writer Amy S. Rosenberg and photo editor Rachel Molenda did. The artist accompanied them, and stopped to talk about four of the 200 photographs on display.
Over the course of an hour in the exhibit, Ross spoke of what was transparent about her process, about the ambitions and the reality of what she could accomplish.
As she put it, the portraits are both intimate and the people depicted mostly alone, but also “grand.”
Working almost exclusively with a large view 8-by-10-inch camera, with a boxy wooden frame and black curtain draped over her head, the self-effacing Ross travels to says the camera opens the floodgates of observation. At locations, like Eurana Park in Weatherly, Pa., the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Congress, public schools, a Black neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia, and, as of this month, the security guards at the Museum itself, Ross gives just one direction: “Don’t move.”
‘The path I didn’t take’
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That is Celia. This is like 50 years ago. She’s very mysterious and inviting and sensual; my pictures are sensual. You think these are not good photographs because they’re ordinary, it’s not fancy or anything. But I like the ordinary.
This is the path I didn’t take. If you see my [other] pictures, they’re not like this at all. It was on the street somewhere in Bethlehem. This was with a really small camera, a Reflex 3x4.
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What brought you to Philadelphia?
Are you kidding? I went to school here. At Moore College of Art. I used to come to the museum, and I had my first kiss on the back steps of the museum. With a Marine stationed on the Naval Base.
That’s a really good first-kiss location.
There were these huge sycamores. I was sitting around the back and I got my first kiss and it didn’t hit for awhile. It was a delayed response! Oh! Wow. That’s my story. That’s my shtick.
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That’s a beautiful memory.
‘Happy-as-hell picture’
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My father had died and I was sad. I couldn’t stand looking at adults. I went to this place [Eurana Park in Weatherly, Pa.] that was safe, and just by some miracle it came together. I’d never made pictures like this. The camera is the film: 8x10 on the tripod, with the big cloth on your head.
It’s very different from the digital world of photography today.
I have no idea about the digital world.
Sometimes, the [prints] are gray. The color of the print is determined when you print them. Even though it’s a happy-as-hell picture, I wouldn’t like a brown picture. It would be a lie. The color is important to the meaning of the pictures. They’re not black and white prints; they’re all made on this printout paper that tones with gold chloride.
So when you’re talking about those tones being important to the meaning …
I can’t talk about meaning. That’s what curators are for.
Everything here except two pictures are what we call a contact: The pictures are the size of the negative.
People are so lazy, they’re not going to walk up to something on the wall and look at it.
Do you want them to walk up to look at it?
Yes. I don’t know how else you can see it!
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This size also reminds me of family photos. We have a bunch of Brownie-size prints in my family too. There is an intimacy about it.
Well, I never made it and said ‘It’s gonna hang in a museum.’
‘It’s OK to be delusional’
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You’ve said you went to the Vietnam Memorial to explore the themes of grief and suffering. Do you feel like you learned about grief and suffering from that experience? Or do you feel you just captured it in the photos?
I wanted to end the war. That was my goal. I’m so surprised that these pictures had no impact whatsoever on the world. And hello, how many people feel that way about everything they did? Has anybody ended war? Has anybody stopped hunger?
It’s OK to be that delusional because then I ended up making these pictures, which might make some more people delusional.
Taken together, it’s quite a display of what’s wrong with war, basically. It’s powerful. But also, you express the futility of trying to convey that to people.
Well, I don’t know if it’s futility now that I’m looking at this.
[Rachel Molenda notes**: There is so much grappling with what she hoped her work would do — change the world — and how that didn’t happen. As someone who works with images, I don’t think that sense of futility is fair to herself or her work. Interpretation and impact are, as she said many times throughout our conversation, “the viewers’ problem.” They are out of her control.]
‘No mean-spirited pictures’
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What are you hoping people come away with thinking about your work?
Well, I hope they enjoy the people. I love these people. And even the people I disliked, I love looking at them. I mean, when I went to Congress, I didn’t make any mean-spirited … well, no … I made one mean or two mean-spirited pictures. I made Democrats look goofy, who I really liked. And I didn’t do it on purpose. It’s what I could find. And I made Republicans look fabulous, who I disliked, because that’s how it worked out. We can like each other and we can dislike each other, what’s the big deal. Every single one of us is just fabulous. But we don’t notice it.
The Judith Joy Ross retrospective runs April 24-Aug. 6 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Staff Contributors
- Reporters: Amy S. Rosenberg and Rachel Molenda
- Editors: Bedatri D. Choudhury and Kate Dailey
- Copy Editor: Lissa Atkins
- Digital Editor: Matt Mullin