🔍
Advanced Search

Judith Joy Ross (b. 1946) is one of photography's most renowned portraitists. Shooting with a tripod-mounted 8-by-10 view camera (the kind used for generations) and making contact prints, she strips photography down to its essentials: the photographer's eye and the subject's presence. Similarly, her mode has almost always been portraiture, attempting to get to the essential of her subjects, what is behind their gaze. In this, she has often been compared to August Sander and Diane Arbus, photographers who sought to categorize society, or to document the uncategorizable. Whether she is photographing adolescent swimmers, war protesters, or politicians, Ross's work is "beautiful in its transparency," as Robert Adams puts it in his seminal book Why People Photograph. Her background includes a 1968 Bachelor degree in Art education, Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and a 1970 Master degree in Photography, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois.