BETHLEHEM, PA.- To hear photographer Judith Joy Ross tell it, her life and career are riddled with nonstarters.

Her stint in graduate school? “Complete failure,” she said. Her teaching career? “Utter failure.”

In her photography archive on the second floor of her yellow house here, there is a box marked “downers,” containing what she considers bad prints of good images.

Ross, who has been taking pictures for nearly 60 years, has never been much of a self-promoter.

“I have a problem with authority figures,” she said on a gray day in February.

Despite all that, Ross, 76, is the subject of a large retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with about 200 of her photographs on display until Aug. 6, almost all of them portraits.

“She’s a giant,” said Peter Barberie, a 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 appeared first; it then made stops at Le Bal in Paris and Fotomuseum den Haag in the Netherlands. “She’s better known in Europe than she is here,” Barberie said.

Although she rarely works in color, calling Ross’ photographs black-and-white is not exactly right; the images occupy a place on the spectrum between gray and sepia. And except for her 1986-87 series featuring Washington politicians, Ross has taken pictures mostly of 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 organized the show. “She’s not photographing celebrities.”

Chuang added that photography was more than a medium to Ross. “She found out in the 1970s that the camera was a way to connect with people,” he said.

Ross agreed, up to a point. “It looks like I love people,” she said of her work. “I do love them for a few seconds. After that? No. Goodbye.”

Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra, who also photographs people, said she first saw Ross’ work in the 1990s.

“I fell in love with her pictures,” said Dijkstra, who has had a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum.

“You can feel if pictures are ‘open’ and if the people are being prejudged,” Dijkstra said, noting that was not the case with Ross.

Ross said that her major series had all stemmed from a different question. For her series taken in Eurana Park in Weatherly, Pennsylvania — represented at the museum by several images including an untitled 1982 image of two children sitting on a stump — it was a large query, indeed: “Why is life worth living?”

Ross is a Pennsylvania native who grew up in the town of Hazelton. At the Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia, she took a photography class “by accident,” she said, and that led to her first picture: a piece of trash on a cobblestone street, illuminated by raking light.

“It still stuns me how mysterious it is,” she said.

Even though in 1970, she got a master’s degree in photography at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Ross said she thinks she did not become a real photographer until a decade later.




“I didn’t have a theme,” she said. “I had been photographing people, but randomly.”

A change in equipment was also transformational. Ross started working with a wooden, folding 8-by-10 Deardorff camera that stands on a tripod. (She still owns and uses it.)

People get curious when she appears with the large contraption. “They think the circus has come to town,” she said. But its effect is that of an icebreaker and a piece of protective armor.

“I am so self-conscious, I can’t even point a cellphone at you,” she said. “I need it for me.”

The Eurana Park series of 1982 was the first time Ross brought her considerable tenacity to bear over a long period. She picked the town of Weatherly because it was close to a family summer home.

“I stood there for the summer at Eurana,” Ross said, frequently 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 in the Philadelphia show, including an untitled 1984 portrait of a Black boy.

Ross recalled that it forced her to ask, “How do you deal with pain and suffering?”

One of her biggest challenges was taking pictures of politicians she didn’t agree with during the making of her congressional series, including Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C.

“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, 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,” 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.)

Szarkowski put Ross in the 1985 “New Photography” show at MoMA with three other artists; the poster for the show hangs in her house.

Chuang called Ross a tough critic of her own work. “She has stacks of incredible pictures that she has never thought to show to other people,” he said.

Even though her most famous series were done in the 1980s, she has been making plenty of striking work since then, including “Annie Hasz, Easton Circle, Easton, Pennsylvania” (2007), featured in the Philadelphia show.

Ross, who is represented by German dealer Thomas Zander, said that sales of her work had been slow lately. She attributed it to the decidedly nonfashionable character of her work, both in style and content. “It’s not in color, and it’s of people,” she said.

The dominance of digital photography is not helping, either. The special paper that Ross likes to print on — which helps her get the rich tones she is known for — is no longer made. “I have a freezer full of it, but it’s almost gone,” she said.

Ross was in her basement standing by her photography development equipment — in a small room with her washer and dryer — when she said that she had an idea for a new series, market headwinds and occasional cynicism be damned.

“I’m not showing anybody anything yet,” she said. “But I’m hopeful.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.