Fox Solomon’s new book, “Got to Go,” is personal by both definitions. The collection’s subject matter is quite diffuse, with photographs shot over three decades, in the United States and twenty foreign countries

American photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon is a master of precision and poise, capturing the most compelling moments in life. On April 2 – her 89th birthday –Solomon will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Centre of Photography.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, American artist Rosalind Fox Solomon traveled across the South creating a powerful series of photographs that reveal the state of the nation during the first decade following the Civil Rights Movement. It is here in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina that we are privy to the complex interconnection of life rooted in the triumphs, tragedies, and traumas of the past.

Rosalind Fox Solomon’s vision of the American South pulls whiteness from its position as infinite and invisible “background,” as Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, to instead examine the white body as a site of difference. This by no means translates to capturing only white subjects, as the system haunts any and all who have lived within its nightmarish logic. Like a foreigner—and there was, in fact, a formative period in her youth, in the Midwest, in which Fox Solomon’s Jewish ethnicity made her a person of suspicion—she looks for signs of otherness and strains of the self in the humid embrace of mother and child, the crushed doll, the dilapidated gate of the estate, the cold gaze of couples. These extraordinary portraits and scenes are not quite documentary, but they pursue a truth about fear, pleasure, confusion, family history, and who and what whiteness feeds on in order to cohere.