J.M. Golding
J.M. Golding is a photographic artist based in the San Francisco Bay area. She chooses plastic, pinhole, and vintage film cameras as her primary tools: plastic cameras such as the Holga for the spontaneity they promote and their capacity to help create dreamlike images, pinhole cameras for their simplicity and their contemplative quality, and vintage film cameras for the subjectivity of the images that are possible. J. M.’s photographs have been shown internationally in numerous juried and invitational group exhibitions, and she is the recipient of the Holga Inspire Award (2013), the Lúz Gallery Curator’s Choice Award (2009), Best of Show in Wanderlust (Dickerman Prints, 2017, in collaboration with Al Brydon), and several Honorable Mentions in other juried exhibitions. Her work has also been published in several books and in Diffusion, Shots, F-Stop, Square, Black & White, and Insight magazines, and on Inside the Outside, Don’t Take Pictures, The Holga Darkroom, and The Shot. She has been profiled in LensCulture, F-Stop Magazine, Wobneb Magazine, Mother F-Stop, Toycamera.es, and Pinholista and interviewed on the Sunny 16 podcast.
Artist’s Statement
Where you are
My work explores the emotional and symbolic significance of the natural world as it reflects internal, subjective experience. Through the photograph, the world outside the person illuminates processes deep inside us that may not be readily accessible to awareness. I often see multilayered aspects of inner worlds in reflection, shadow, and multiple exposure. I work in lo-fi processes, primarily using traditional analogue methods, including Holga and other plastic cameras, pinhole cameras, and vintage film cameras.
Where you are explores integration of closeness and distance using double exposure. The photographs contain elements of each of the two exposures, one focused close and one focused far away, fusing them to create an image that could not have been anticipated by either one alone. In superimposing closeness and distance on one frame of film, they join near and far, solid and ethereal, objective and subjective, sharp and blurred, literal and metaphorical, real and imagined.