This article is part of our dedicated Museums section on how art institutions reach new artists and attract new audiences.
BETHLEHEM, Pa. – To hear photographer Judith Joy Ross tell it, her life and career are riddled with non-starters.
Her stint in graduate school? “Complete failure,” she said. Her teaching career? “Utter failure.”
In her photo archive on the second floor of her yellow house here, there’s a box labeled “downers,” which she says contains bad prints of good photos.
Ms. Ross, who has been shooting for nearly 60 years, has never really been much of a self-promoter.
“I have a problem with authority figures,” she said on a gray February day.
Despite all that, Ms. Ross, 76, is the subject of a major retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with about 200 of her photographs on display through August 6, almost all of them portraits.
“She’s a giant,” says Peter Barberie, curator of photographs at the museum. “In 500 years people will be talking about her work.”
The show was jointly organized by the Philadelphia museum and the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid, where it first appeared; it subsequently stopped at Le Bal in Paris and Fotomuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands. “She’s better known in Europe than here,” Mr. Barberie said.
Although she rarely works in color, it’s not entirely accurate to call Mrs. Ross’s photographs black and white; the images occupy a place on the spectrum between gray and sepia. And apart from her 1986-87 series with Washington politicians, Ms. Ross has mostly shot people on the street, in parks or in schools.
“The subject matter is not easy; it’s complex,” said Joshua Chuang, an independent curator who hosted the show. “She doesn’t photograph celebrities.”
Mr. Chuang added that photography was more than a medium for Ms. Ross. “She discovered in the 1970s that the camera was a way to connect with people,” he said.
Mrs. Ross agreed, to an extent. “It seems I like people,” she said of her work. “I really love them for a few seconds. Then? No. Bye.”
Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra, who also photographs people, said she first saw Ms Ross’s work in the 1990s.
“I fell in love with her photos,” said Ms. Dijkstra, who has had a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum.
“You can sense if photos are ‘open’ and if people are biased,” Ms Dijkstra said, pointing out that was not the case with Ms Ross.
Ms. Ross said her big runs all stemmed from a different demand. For her series taken at Eurana Park in Weatherly, Pa. — represented at the museum by several images, including a 1982 untitled statue of two children sitting on a tree stump — it was indeed a big question: “Why is life worth living?”
Mrs. Ross was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in the town of Hazelton. At the Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia, she “accidentally” took a photography class, she said, and that led to her first photo: a piece of trash on a cobblestone street, lit by floodlight.
“It still amazes me how mysterious it is,” she said.
Although she earned a master’s degree in photography from the Institute of Design at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology in 1970, Ms. Ross says she doesn’t think she became a real photographer until a decade later.
“I didn’t have a theme,” she said. “I had photographed people, but randomly.”
A change in equipment was also transformational. Mrs. Ross started working with a wooden, folding 8-by-10 Deardorff camera mounted on a tripod. (She still owns and uses it.)
People get curious when she shows up with the big thing. “They think the circus has come to town,” she said. But the effect is that of an icebreaker and a piece of protective armor.
“I’m so self-conscious I can’t even point a cell phone at you,” she said. “I need it for myself.”
The 1982 Eurana Park series was the first time Mrs. Ross applied her considerable tenacity over a long period of time. She chose the town of Weatherly because it was close to a family summer home.
“I stood there at Eurana for the summer,” Ms. Ross said, regularly photographing children. “It was a totally inappropriate space to do that. But I didn’t care. That tells you what kind of person I am.”
People visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial became her next long-term subject. Sixteen works from the 1983-84 series are on display in the Philadelphia exhibit, including a 1984 untitled portrait of a black boy.
Ms. Ross recalled it forced her to ask, “How do you deal with pain and suffering?”
One of her biggest challenges was taking pictures of politicians she disagreed with while making her congressional series, including South Carolina Republican Senator Strom Thurmond.
“I didn’t like Strom,” she said. “But I was in awe of him. It was like meeting the king.” He served in the Senate for 48 years and died in 2003.
Armed with some of her photographs, Mrs. Ross overcame her shyness and submitted her work to the Museum of Modern Art, earning a same-day meeting with John Szarkowski, an influential photography curator.
“He asked me if I had heard of August Sander, and I denied it,” Ms Ross said, referring to the German photographer known for his portraits. “He knew I was lying.” (Sander is one of her biggest influences, she said, a list that also includes Robert Adams and Eugène Atget.)
Mr. Szarkowski put Ms. Ross in the 1985 “New Photography” show at the MoMA with three other artists; the poster for the show hangs in her house.
Mr. Chuang called Ms. Ross a harsh critic of her own work. “She has stacks of incredible photos that she never thought she’d show other people,” he said.
Although her most famous series was created in the 1980s, she has created many notable work since then, including “Annie Hasz, Easton Circle, Easton, Pennsylvania” (2007), featured on the Philadelphia show.
Ms. Ross, who is represented by German dealer Thomas Zander, said sales of her work have been slow lately. She attributed it to the decidedly unfashionable nature of her work, both in style and content. “It’s not in color, and it’s from people,” she said.
The dominance of digital photography doesn’t help either. The special paper that Mrs. Ross likes to print on—which gives her the rich hues she’s known for—is no longer being made. “I have a freezer full of it, but it’s almost gone,” she said.
Ms. Ross was standing in her basement next to her photography development equipment — in a small room with her washer and dryer — when she said she had an idea for a new series, market headwinds and occasional cynicism.
“I’m not showing anyone anything yet,” she said. “But I’m hopeful.”