PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Philadelphia Museum of Art is the only U.S. venue—following Madrid, Paris, and the Hague—for the traveling retrospective exhibition devoted to the photographs of Judith Joy Ross, whose images offer a quietly penetrating portrait of our age. Spanning a period from the 1970s through the 2010s, Judith Joy Ross is the largest exhibition to feature the work of this preeminent portrait photographer to date. Ross’s subjects include children at municipal parks or in the public schools of Hazleton, Pennsylvania; members of Congress in Washington, DC; and African immigrants in Paris. The nation’s wars and invasions have precipitated many arresting images by Ross, including visitors to the Vietnam War Memorial, reservists called into active duty, and civilians supporting or protesting U.S. wars in the Middle East.

Sasha Suda, George D. Widener Director and CEO at the Philadelphia Museum of Art said: “Judith Joy Ross presents us with a portrait of the people of our time. Some of Ross’s most compelling photographs originate in Philadelphia, where she discovered photography. We look forward to sharing this very human body of work with our visitors.”

Guest curator Joshua Chuang notes, “The overarching themes in Ross’s oeuvre form a catalogue of the human experience: innocence and loss; courage and fear; bitterness and beauty; hubris; the resilience of and disenchantment of individuals and a people.”




Using a large format, 8 x 10 in. view camera since the 1980s, Ross has been capturing her brief encounters with a cross-section of American people and with a special focus on eastern Pennsylvania where she was born and raised. Her work reformulates the relationship between photographer and the photographed and reflects emotional and psychological connections that traverse boundaries and resist sentimentality. The exhibition encompasses all her major projects as well as smaller series and contains images that have not been on view before.

The entire exhibition is drawn from Judith Joy Ross’s personal archive. The Philadelphia presentation has been augmented by a group of works by the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), selected by Ross who deeply admires Atget. Both artists used large-format cameras and straightforward contact prints to record their subjects.

Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, observes, “Judith Joy Ross’s achievement is immense. With humility and quiet specificity, she produced an enduring, universal body of photographs about human experience. We are thrilled to present this survey celebrating an internationally acclaimed artist who is also a hometown hero for Philadelphia and the region.”

Judith Joy Ross is curated by independent curator Joshua Chuang. In Philadelphia, the curatorial team also includes Peter Barberie, Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center; Amanda N. Bock, Lynne and Harold Honickman Assistant Curator of Photographs; and Molly Kalkstein, Horace W. Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography.

Judith Joy Ross (born Hazleton, PA, 1946) attended public schools and has maintained lifelong ties to the community in which she was raised. In 1968, she graduated from Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, where she discovered an abiding fascination with photography. She earned her master’s degree two years later at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. Early in 1980, following several trips to Europe, Ross purchased an 8x10-inch view camera, a weighty piece of equipment traditionally used for architectural work. Ever since, she has employed it as a tool to capture her brief encounters with strangers, with a particular focus on people in eastern Pennsylvania. While she has traveled considerably, she has made eastern Pennsylvania her home; many of her most significant bodies of work comprise portraits made within just a few miles of her house. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Andrea Frank Foundation. In 2017, she received a Lucie Award for Achievement in Portraiture. Her work has been represented in many group and solo exhibitions, including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Canada; Lillehammer Art Museum, Gudbrandsdalen, Norway; and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany. This exhibition, Judith Joy Ross, premiered in 2022 at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, before traveling to Le Bal, Paris, and the Hague Museum of Photography, the Netherlands, where it remains on view through March 2023. It opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on April 24, 2023.