Between today, 14 December, 2024 and the end of January, 2025
there are 7 weekends.
With the world so unsure and unstable,
threatening and deadly violent
I’ve decided to offer a few images per each weekend until then.
I hope they are stimulants to thought, to self and social enquiry.
Each short, illustrated group will consist of my own photographs
from distinctively different elements of my work,
with my writing about how they represent the medium,
the world and my/our lives.
The new normal being imposed upon us
enforces the acceptance
of very low moral, political, social and aesthetic thresholds.
For these 7 weekends I will offer what a dear friend of mine,
Professor Nigel Osborne, composer and aid worker
called ‘gifts of culture’. Enjoy.
This following is from a series of illustrated video talks I am currently writing:
”I came to recognise (from studying Caravaggio, W. Eugene Smith and others)
I was and am less important than the story;
that I am a free and willing servant to other’s wants and needs;
that my utility is to give the voiceless a voice;
to expose what is hidden;
to make visible what is unclear and unknown,
and to understand that most important pronoun is ‘we’ and not ‘me”
The three images above came from a series of ten children’s books I photographed and co-wrote with Sarah Cox for Penguin’s imprint, Kestrel. Currently they are part of an extent exhibition called HOME (or “The Demise of the English Industrial Working Class”.
In those days the working class had a powerful identity and a great pride in who they were. Since then many have been reduced to being a lost and weakened mass, with little sense of who they are and what their identity is. Whilst the working class was the reserve of many faulty angels who carried with them misogny, racism and other social dysfunctions, they were victims of poor education, poverty, limited opportunities and cultural manipulations.
What of today under Neoliberalism?
All photographs by Robert Golden represented by TopFoto