In summer 1981, in the aftermath of her father’s death, Judith Joy Ross sought solace from her grief at Eurana Park in Weatherly, north-east Pennsylvania, not far from where she grew up. At first she spent time at the park’s swimming hole; later she began photographing the young people milling around her. The following summer she returned with a large-format camera, an 8x10in Deardorff that helped shape the antique look of much of her subsequent work, and captured this marvellous portrait.
The scene is beautiful in its awkwardness. While the smaller girl in the middle seems largely unfazed by Ross’s camera, her taller companions look gawkily self-conscious as they lean towards each other, shielding their bodies and clutching their ice creams for comfort. According to Kevin Moore, artistic director of FotoFocus in Cincinnati who has included this and two other of Ross’s images in the gallery’s inaugural Big Tent exhibition, such signs of vulnerability are a recurring feature of the photographer’s work. “I think that awkwardness is something she relates to from her own perspective,” he says.
Ross, who is now 80, has also been keenly attentive in her work to economic deprivation. “Having grown up in a working-class environment, and living in that her whole life, that’s what she sees,” says Moore. Weatherly, where this photograph was taken, sits in Carbon County, whose coal-mining industry collapsed in the 1950s. The area never really recovered, and by the 1980s unemployment and poverty rates were high. It’s reasonable to assume that quite a few of her subjects in Eurana Park that summer were, like Ross, seeking respite from difficult times.
That feeling comes through for Moore in this image, though it’s not at the expense of summertime delights. “When you see children growing up in places like [Weatherly], they might not have a big future ahead of them,” he says, “but at that moment in their lives they’re having a lovely time – they’re having the pleasure of eating an ice cream and being in a swimsuit at the park.”
Big Tent, featuring images by Judith Joy Ross, runs at FotoFocus Centre, Cincinnati, OH, until 22 August
Photograph by Judith Joy Ross
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