PMA hosts only U.S. show of Pennsylvania native Judith Joy Ross’s international photography exhibit
Ross lives in Bethlehem, Pa., and is a "hometown hero."
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Hazleton-born photographer Judith Joy Ross, 77, doesn’t go for much chitchat with her subjects, despite a temporarily intense relationship she has likened to falling in love “for 15 minutes.”
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 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, she says she rarely says anything to her subjects beyond, “Don’t move.”
“I don’t ask anyone to pose,” she said in a 2021 conversation with Philadelphia Museum of Art curator Peter Barberie. “I ask them to hold still. Just hold still. And usually with enthusiasm: ‘Oh my God, don’t move.’ I don’t have conversations with people, I have enthusiasms, because I really see something.”
Those minutes with her subjects have produced a body of work Barberie calls “a portrait of our democracy.”
He calls Ross, who lives in Bethlehem, “a hometown hero.”
The PMA is hosting the largest retrospective exhibition of Ross’ work, exhibiting 200 of her photographs April 24 through Aug. 6. There will also be 10 works by the French architectural photographer Eugène Atget, selected by Ross.
The exhibition is a collaboration between PMA and the MAPFRE Foundation, Madrid. Philadelphia will be the only U.S. venue following Madrid, Paris, and the Hague.
Ross says that through her portraits, she seeks answers — without actually asking — to questions like, “How do you deal with pain and suffering?”
At the Vietnam Memorial, “I didn’t have to ask anybody here because that’s what they were dealing with.”
At Eurana Park, she was “looking for why life’s worth living and I found it here” in a place, with its young subjects, “where life is good. Not perfect. But good.”
At Philly’s Moore College of Art, Ross was steered toward art education, but wound up in a photography course that changed everything. “Walking around ... I don’t see people,” she said. “But once I have a camera, there’s something turned on. I’m in seeing mode.”
The exhibition, which includes about 200 photographs and a variety of documentary material, charts the photographer’s work through chronological sections that provide an overview of the main projects throughout her career, including images that have never been exhibited and images taken without any specific project in mind. The photographs are drawn primarily from the artist’s personal archive, as well as from important private and public collections of her work, including that of the PMA.
“Judith Joy Ross” runs April 24 to Aug. 6 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Dorrance Galleries, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Phila., 215-763-8100 or philamuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/judith-joy-ross.