We Are the Subject: Diane Arbus, Rosalind Fox Solomon, and Lisette Model

Rosalind Fox Solomon, Seattle, from “Portraits in the Time of AIDS”, 1987 (© Rosalind Fox Solomon. Courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York)

“We are the subject,” the title of the show currently on view at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery, cites Lisette Model’s notion of the photographer’s subject matter: “We are the subject,” she writes in one of her teaching notebooks, “the object is the world around us.”

There are nearly forty images—dense, intense, almost claustrophobic—included in the show, which brings together the work of Model and two photographers who had once been her pupils, Diane Arbus and Rosalind Fox Solomon. (The three women were first—and last—shown together in 1977 at the Galerie Zabriskie in Paris.) “Photograph from your guts,” Model