Brian Goldman
We are about something, and it is well to know what we are about….
~ John Dewey
The Lone Star sat atop my childhood home in Houston. It spanned twelve feet, was rumored to be made of gold, and visible from space - the latter being why I wrote NASA about becoming an astronaut.
Those days were about hay-bale forts, Star Wars, and Moon Lake, a self named astral landscape owing to perturbations from gas pipelines that marked the southern boundary of our property. My mom’s stories had me always living some version of Texas lore. Hers were the sparks of curiosity that set the cosmos ablaze with surprise.
I attended Texas A&M University where a passion for science eventually led to deeper explorations into meaning, and a degree in Philosophy. Philosophy requires a sensitive engagement with the world; a presence of mind that is tuned to the varieties of experience. Its ongoing presence, resolute in its love of wisdom, has a way of altering one’s DNA. The experience fully funded my sense of wonder.
My reflective nature tends to carry on with the specter of experience, much like Sal in On the Road, or Whitman in Leaves of Grass. I came to appreciate the way in which history and our present engagement with person, place, and thing are coextensive of oneself.
We are storied; not just being of the world, but being about the world. It is my belief that this storied self can indeed be documented and stand as a living memory for the authentic, non-derivative self that many seek.
Life as we live it, writes Thomas Hess, “is a matter of endless ambiguities and proliferating meanings; transparencies upon transparencies make an image that, while it blurs in superimpositions, takes on the actuality of rocks.” These poetic words describe, what is for me, the visual press of photography. To make a photograph, to define a moment out of the current of sentiment, is among my proudest achievements.
I am a freelance and editorial photographer based in Houston. For information on booking or assignments, please email goldman@goldmanpictures.com.
Brian Goldman