J. M. Golding

Since I ran across the work of J.M. Golding and discovered her photography created with plastic toy camera, I have been eager to share it with you. There is a mysterious and dreamlike quality that is present. A surreal and dark ambience lies among the imagery, but at the same time the environments are very inviting. Transitional Landscapes, featured below, can also be seen on her website, as well as many more great work. www.jmgolding.com Subscribe to her email newsletter here www.jmgolding.com/contact

J. M. Golding is a fine art photographer based in the San Francisco Bay area. She chooses plastic, pinhole, and vintage film cameras as her primary photographic 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 group exhibitions; for example, the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, and 9th Annual International Juried Plastic Camera Shows and 3rd Annual and 4th Biennial Juried Pinhole Shows (RayKo Photo Center, San Francisco, CA), Krappy Kamera XIII and XV (Soho Photo, New York), the Somerville Toy Camera Festival (2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016), and Holga Out of the Box (2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015); and were included in Bending the Light (Oakland Museum exhibit at Oakland International Airport, CA, 2011-2), Time in a Can (Fundacion Diario, Madrid), and Obscura: 121 Views (Galerie Pflüger68, Berlin). She is the recipient of the 2013 Holga Inspire Award, the Lúz Gallery Curator’s Choice Award (2009), and several Honorable Mentions in juried exhibitions.

Transitional landscapes

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.

The photographs in this series contain transitions from outer landscape to inner, from objective landscape to subjective. They also embody the eye’s transitions across the scene, moving incrementally from one perspective to another. Square frames of film that are normally separate join together to form new, integrated images that would not have been possible otherwise, wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts, transcending the literal separation of the component scenes. Because the multiple, overlapping exposures used to create these photographs are made sequentially, as compared to the single moment typically seen in photographs, the series of exposures portrays transitions in time from one moment to the next, creating a connection between past and present, and possibly, present and future. Although the time and distance traversed are in many ways small, the transitions across them create surprising changes in what is visible.