Though hardly a stranger in photography circles, Rosalind Solomon is gradually gaining prominence in the mainstream. After four decades trekking Japan, Guatemala, Peru, India, Nepal, South Africa, and Poland with a medium format point and shoot, the veteran photographer and recent octogenarian is being celebrated in New York in multiple ways. Her single-artist exhibition, RITUAL (now on view at Bruce Silverstein Gallery through June), and the MoMA’s Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (taking place nearly twenty-five years after her first Ritual show at the MoMA) feature the artist in bold documentary form. Reflecting an ongoing theme in her work, RITUAL documents private meditation and communal rites binding people of various cultures. A humanist to the core, Solomon captures expressions sharpening the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.
     Known for her window-into-the-world immediacy rendered via the use of square format and strobe lighting, Solomon’s work has often been likened to that of Diane Arbus (with both women’s penchant for deviant subject matter only augmenting the comparison — the former favoring battered baby dolls, the latter, society’s castoffs).