Judith Joy Ross

"Judith Joy Ross (American, b. 1946)".

Personal life

Judith Ross was born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania in 1946. She graduated from the Moore College of Art in 1968 and earned a Master's Degree in Photography in 1970 from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where she studied with Aaron Siskind.

Works

Judith Joy Ross (American b. 1946) since the early 1980s, has photographed a cross section of the American population, especially people in eastern Pennsylvania, where she was born and raised. Ross uses an 8 x 10 inch view camera mounted on a tripod and her portraits are mad on printing out paper, an arcane process in which a contact print is made without an enlarger by placing a negative on photographic paper, and then exposing it to sunlight for a few minutes to a few hours. The photographer Robert Adams wrote, "Judith Ross has, as an artist, no formula. She starts over again each time- the riskiest way to do it. She was has a style, of course, but it is austere. It cannot, if she panics, be used to take place of content." Her photographic antecedants include the German August Sander and the American Diane Arbus.

Her series include children swimming at Eurana Park in Weatherly, Pennsylvania (1982), visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. (1983-84), members of the United States Congress and their aides in their Washington offices (1986-1987), laborers, people at shopping malls and children at play near her home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She has also photographed immigrants in New York City and Paris, and was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to photograph tech workers in Silicon Valley, California. One of her major projects, pictures made from 1992-1994 in Hazleton public schools she had attended in the 1950s and 1960s, was published by Yale University Press in 2006 as Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools.

Ross has been awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1985), an Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1986), a City of Easton/Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Grant (1988), the Charles Pratt Memorial Award (1992), and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Grant (1991).

Monographs and exhibition catalogues of her work have been published internationally. Her photographs are included in numerous institutional collections including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (where she was selected by John Szarkowski to be in the first exhibition in the influential New Photography series), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Addison Gallery of American Art, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, Pennsylvania, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Die Photographische Sammlung, Cologne, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among others. In 2011, Die Photographische Sammlung in Cologne organized a retrospective exhibition of Ross's work which travelled to the Kunstmuseum Kloster in Madeburg and the Foundation A Stichting, Brussels. A four volume book of her work is currently being organized.

Books of photographs by Judith Joy Ross:

Judith Joy Ross, Contemporaries/A Photographic Series, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, essay by Susan Kismaric, 1995

Judith Joy Ross. Portraits, Hannover, Sprengel Museum, essay by Thomas Weski, 1996

Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools, New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, essay by Jock Reynolds, 2006

Protest the War, Gottingen, Steidl, essay by Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, 2007

Living with War. Portraits, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Gulf War, Protest the War, Gottingen, Steidl, edited and with an essay by Heinz Liesbrock, 2008

Judith Joy Ross. Photographs Since 1982, Cologne, Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur im Mediapark, essays by Gabriele Conrath-Scholl and Claudia Schubert, 2011