Judith Joy Ross is one of the great American portraitists of the twentieth century, but her work – a production of almost forty years – has always been underestimated and therefore less known by the general public. However, his colleagues have always recognized its value, from Robert Adams to Paul Graham, who said: “Some act as if they want to photograph houses, trees and rocks, but what they really want is to have the resourcefulness they are capable of. Judith Ross when she portrays people ”.
Ross was born in 1946 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. He began photographing in the mid-seventies and since 1981 he mainly uses large format machines such as the Deardoff, personally printing the negatives in direct contact with the paper and with a gold tone, in order to avoid too accentuated contrasts. His attention is directed to the places in Pennsylvania where she grew up, such as i diner, the parks, the banks of the river where as a child she spent her days with her family. But within these urban and rural landscapes, ordinary people are the real protagonists of her work, the American middle class that lives outside of any spectacular situation.
Without exploiting sentimentality or irony, and without judging, Ross manages to get in touch with the subjects with an extreme delicacy, able to reach the complexity of what each of them contains within them: innocence, courage. , fear, bitterness, disenchantment and beauty; states of mind that reveal the human experience in all its fragility.
The photographer’s work is told by a book published by Atelier Exb and by an exhibition in Le Bal, in Paris, until 18 September.