Likenesses
The portraits in "Likenesses" attend to how people relate to one another. To settings and things. Husbands and wives, actors and directors, parents and children, a set-designer and his crew, a poet in his landscape, a professor among his books: here are vivid and touching evocations of many notable writers, artists, theatre people, and educators, and their worlds. Reviewing an exhibition of Judith Aronson's work in 2006, Mark Feeney in the "Boston Globe" said: "All photographers should click so well. The resulting images miraculously combine detachment and intensity". He praised her photos as "rich and exacting". What makes "Likenesses" unique is that the sitters observe and comment on one another – memories, assessments, elegies, tributes. A historian calls up a poet who figures elsewhere in the book; a poet summons up memories of her mother, a distinguished woman of letters, alongside her in the photo. The gallery opens its doors with a welcoming foreword from one of the sitters, Charles Saumarez Smith, the Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts, who was previously the head of the National Portrait Gallery and of the National Gallery.
About the Author
Judith Aronson has a BA in American Studies from the University of Michigan, and from Yale University a master's in City Planning and an MFA in Graphic Design. For three years in the 1970s she travelled and worked in south-east Asia, including a year assisting the photographer and director of the Insight Guides, Hans Hoefer. Aronson credits much of her photographic knowledge to this experience. For twelve years Aronson lived in England, where she worked as a graphic designer and photojournalist for, among others, the Telegraph Sunday Magazine. Residing in Boston since 1986 and returning to England for the summers, she has practised graphic design and photography while teaching at Boston University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and the New England School of Art and Design. Now full-time in the Communications Department at Simmons College, she teaches graphic design. In 2003 she received a grant from the Colleges of the Fenway to develop and co-teach an environmental design course, Wayfinding: Information Architecture and Public Spaces. Three exhibitions of Aronson's portrait work, Faces (1998-1999), featured photographs of writers and artists. Many of these photographs appeared in The Threepenny Review in 2003. In 2006, the Isole Gallery of Art and Industrial Design, Boston, held a two-part retrospective of her colour photographs entitled Tactile Mercantile. "Likenesses" consists of both photographic portraits and reflections and is published in May 2010.
