Back in 1967, when Judith Joy Ross was a shy and awkward 20-year-old, still figuring out how to be a photographer, she used to take what she calls “sneaking pictures” of people on the street. “I had various little techniques,” she tells me. “Often I’d pretend to be working out how to use the camera, while I was actually shooting.”
How, I ask, did she conquer her self-consciousness and approach the myriad passing strangers, whose portraits now amount to one of the most singular and affecting bodies of work in American photography? “You pick a subject and you make yourself do it,” she replies. “That was hard for me. It was like, how much torture can I take? But, what I would see in a person, if only for a moment, was so wonderful, it was worth it.”
