In Annie Ernaux's novelistic memoir "The Years," she charts how a woman's selfhood can slip away as she becomes enmeshed in new identities such as wife or mother. Through photographs, though, her old selves are preserved. Each time the shutter snaps, in that fragment of a second, she is crystallized in time: sempiternally sixteen, or twenty-seven, or forty-eight. Pictures have the power, Ernaux suggests, to "save something from the time where we will never be again."
Fox Solomon grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, to young parents who liked to drink Martinis and go to parties. Her writings about that period are filled with a longing for acceptance, both inside the household and outside. She dreamed of being a writer, but her mother, obsessed with classical femininity, encouraged her to abandon what she deemed idle reveries and instead focus on making herself desirable. "She believes in loveliness, graciousness, good breeding, and ladylike manners," Fox Solomon writes.
In defiance of this mantra, Fox Solomon lets the self-portraits in her book starkly convey the brutality of aging. Her pictures, many of them nude, reflect not only personal history but universal themes of identity and the evolution of self over time. This powerful juxtaposition of youth and age challenges the societal standards of beauty and femininity, inviting the viewer to confront their perceptions of aging.
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