Judith Joy Ross

With its current exhibition, Fundación MAPFRE presents the most comprehensive retrospective to date of photographer Judith Joy Ross (Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 1946). Produced by Fundación MAPFRE and curated by Joshua Chuang, the exhibit explores the artist’s photographic archive developed over the past 40 years.

During her career, Ross has worked principally in the genre of portraiture. For her, making portraits is a way to understand the emotional truths of those around her. She does not work in the studio, but in the street and other public spaces. Her portraits are largely made in the context of series, or what the art historian Svetlana Alpers in her catalogue essay calls “campaigns” on specific themes. 

She began to photograph as a student at Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art & Design and graduated with a master’s degree in photography in 1970 from the Institute of Design in Chicago. In 1981 Ross began to photograph with an 8x10 view camera. 

In 1984 she met John Szarkowski, the Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Soon afterwards Szarkowski acquired two of her photographs for the museum’s collection.

In 1985 a selection from Ross’s series Portraits at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C. was featured in the inaugural New Photography exhibition at MoMA. That same year, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, which she used to make portraits of U.S. Congresspeople and their aides. In 1992 she was awarded the Charles Pratt Memorial Prize, which made possible her project to photograph in public schools. In 1993 Ross had a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and her photographs were included in group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and at the Lillehammer Art Museum, Norway. 

In 2006 the Yale University Art Gallery published Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools, the first full treatment of one of Ross’s series. Over the years Ross has presented her work in major solo exhibitions at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop, Germany, Fondation A Stichting in Brussels, and Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York. Her first retrospective took place in 2011 at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur in Cologne, Germany, home to the archive of August Sander. In 2017 Ross won the Lucie Award for Achievement in Portraiture.

The present retrospective, composed of 200 photographs as well as archival materials, unfolds chronologically over nine sections that chart a wide panorama of the artist’s key projects, and also includes a revelatory number of previously unpublished works and pictures made independently of Ross’s known series. All of the photographs come from the artist’s personal archive. Its catalogue is available in both Spanish and English.

Following its closing in Madrid, the exhibition will be shown at LE BAL (Paris), from February to May 2022 and at Fotomuseum Den Haag (The Hague), from November 2022 to March 2023.