My new book

TRANSIENT LIGHT, FLEETING TIME

This week I thought to introduce readers to my book by responding to early critics who asked me to place myself in history, which I have done below. The book offers 50 essays and 50 images about thinking of picture making, with a unity between that and living one’s life dedicated to beauty, or image making, or storytelling, or even changing the world. It addresses the immense power of the medium and offers the reader different lenses to look at its power and how one might grasp it.

On 19th  January it should be available on all major bookselling sites and in major and small bookshops. It will be available as the hardcover in The Bridport Bookshop, and on-line as an epub for all phones, pads and computers at Amazon and the other sellers. It should be for sale in the US, Australia, much of Europe and many other countries. I have made it as inexpensive as possible so as many people as possible can access it.

If any friends or others who enjoy it are so disposed, writing a reaction/critique is hugely helpful in the ranking of books online, and therefore of their visibility.

Enjoy.

FROM THE FORWARD
The kind friends who have read the book and offered ideas and advice, have said that it would help readers to know the timeline of my development, to be able to situate ideas in an historical context. And of course, I understand that may be of some value.

HISTORY
I was born on July 4th 1945 in Detroit Michigan, then the largest military-industrial complex in the world. My birth was midway between the defeat of the Nazi’s in Europe and the US dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

I brought myself up on classical forms of picture making. Modern Art had hardly touched the lower middleclass mid-western American world of the late fifties. It was a city in which the confirmed racist and active antisemite, Henry Ford, one of the major industrialists of the early twentieth century, tried to have the visionary murals created in the Detroit Institute of Arts by Diego Rivera, painted over and banished from history. Seeing these murals at the age of 8 made me determined to become a visual artist telling stories that would matter.

Detroit was at the end of a long, painful migration of poor black sharecroppers, beginning deep in the cotton fields of the far away Mississippi delta, travelling up the Mississippi River to the St. Louis railhead where they offloaded cotton and up-loaded cattle; then travelling further north and east to the slaughterhouses and meat packing plants of Chicago, finally arriving at the rubber and chemical factories and the huge automotive and military plants of Detroit. As white workers joined the armed forces during the Second World War, which was forbidden for most Black Americans, the city sucked up this impoverished humanity.

These tired lonely men and some women shared their cultural luggage, jangled by the huge industrial machines with their roaring noise and clanging metallic incisions, and from out of the migrant’s blues and gospel came the Motown sound. This was a part of the culture which had some vibrancy as I grew up. Vibrancy but reaction from the industrialists who believed all leaders who were attempting to organize the new black workers into trade union were Communists, and all Communists were Jews, so within this city growing like topsy, anti-Semitism thrived as did the racism of Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party.

In that period, while coming into maturity, my teenage life was spent in silent dialogues with great masters of photography, art critics and some historians. I have never met any of them, but I looked and read and thought and asked questions. I dreamt of a life in which I would be with these people; I would drink wine, perhaps become a bit tipsy and dance with them, all fascinating, intelligent artists. With luck, I have encountered wonderful people and fine artists and poets and certainly wound up dancing a life with an extraordinary, talented and beautiful woman, but the following essays in my book are more about the private dialogue and the search, thus far unended, to become a full creative spirit and a complete human being.

I went to University in Detroit and then to Ann Arbour, at the University of Michigan from autumn 1963 to spring 1967, with a year studying at The London School of Film Technique.

Immediately I graduated, I moved to New York city where I used the portfolio I had built over the 4 years in university to look for freelance jobs as a photographer. Two days after I arrived I was given my first job shooting a photo-illustration for the cover of a music score. I have not stopped working professionally since then.

For many reasons I moved to and stayed in Ibiza between September 1969 until May 1970. It was then a beautiful but impoverished prison island of the Franco regime. I returned to London (where I previously studied) and again sought commissions.

Since then I have worked as a photojournalist for many newspapers and magazines, had published 10 award winning books called THE PEOPLE WORKING SERIES for one of Penguin’s imprints, made portraits for record and book covers and for magazine articles, illustrated over 30 books, directed and lit about 900 commercials for TV, wrote and directed two award winning feather films and over 40 documentaries. I lived in London until 1999 when I moved to the southwest of England where I now live, work and teach from.  

All the above is a sketch of a life devoted to ideas, to the truths I could discover/uncover and recognise. These are the things revealed in the following essays. While for me there is no separation between who I am and the images/films I make. For me, making images is indistinguishable from living life, loving and wishing to give, to provide ideas and to unwrap moral values.

One of the essays with the descriptive text below of the picture on the right.

REACTIONS TO THE BOOK BEFORE PUBLICATION

“Transient Light, Fleeting Time is a beautiful and wise book full of hope. It is a timely reminder of the combined power of story and image. Robert Golden uniquely seizes the world, and then presents us with many paths through the dark forest.”
Jules Pretty, author of This Luminous Coast and Sea Sagas of the North

"Rare among photographers of this stature, Robert Golden elegantly articulates
the real and fundamental concerns that we face in deciding what to photograph,how to engage and what we’re using our skills for. Impressively, he stays grounded as he writes, helped by a near-faultless selection of photographs drawn from his long career.”
Michael Freeman, one of the most widely published photographers worldwide

“I love the pictures and I really like the format- short pieces kind of riffing off” the pictures.”
Paul Cook, Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies University of Leeds

“The vibe coming off the pages is so rich and there for inspiring and touching – it makes the reader want to be a better person … (and even to feel that they can be).”Peta Lily, theatre maker, actor, teacher

“Everything was wonderful… interesting…. clear…. insightful…. stimulating… beautiful… inspiring… educative. As a struggling artist / human being, I felt less alone reading Robert’s words.”
Sam Birt, artist and film-maker

“Robert shows how to construct a narrative; explains why we need to tell them; who will benefit from hearing them. He helps us understand the function of a camera to record history, tradition and beauty; to document life as we live it.”
I .& J. U., artists & professional educator, England