Tom Goodman was born in Baltimore, MD, in 1948. After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1969 with honors in Art he received an MFA from the University of New Mexico in 1973.
In 1975 he was hired by the University of Texas at San Antonio to develop the photography program. Three years later he moved to Philadelphia to teach at the University of the Arts (then the Philadelphia College of Art). While at PCA he taught photography, the history of photography, seminars in photography and film criticism, and a seminar in the painting department on the history of illusionism. He also taught a survey of the history of art (ancient to medieval, renaissance to modern) at the Curtis Institute of Music and during this period he began Tom Goodman Inc., an agency representing photographers and digital illustrators for commercial assignments.
In 2008 Goodman began photographing again for the first time in nearly twenty-five years, and in 2009 he dissolved his corporation to re-devote himself full-time to art.
Garry Winogrand famously declared: \"I photograph in order to see what something looks like photographed.\" while Flannery O'Connor stated, \"I write because I don't know what I think before I write what I say\".
* * * * * * * *
The goal was not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with the constitution of a pictorial fact. (Georges Braque speaking of the work of the Cubists)
* * * * * * * *
Art emerges from many wellsprings. One that I've long held is especially deep is absence. Some artists seek to fill voids in their lives, to create something where things are missing or absent, to complete something that is not whole or present. Describing a writer he knows, the protagonist in one of E. X. Ferrars' mysteries put it this way: \"I said to myself that he only wrote about things that were a bit lacking in his makeup, things he somehow needed to handle in his imagination becasue they weren't there in reality.\"
* * * * * * * *
Art is \"a corner of nature seen through a temperament.\" (Emile Zola)
* * * * * * * *
The artistic vocation is a way of seeing and knowing the world. (Jed Perl)
* * * * * * * *
\"True originality does not consist in merely conforming to the paramount conditions of style, but in a kind of inspired state personal to the artist\", who takes a subject or motif and reimagines it not in relation to the art of his own time but in relation to a universal sense of the Ideal. (Hegel via Jed Perl)
* * * * * * * *
Appearances, as the saying goes, can be deceiving. Photography is thought to unravel mysteries, but at its best often succeeds in deepening them.
* * * * * * * *
Despite the best intentions and preparation, the printed image always surprises and reveals.
* * * * * * * *
Chance favors the prepared mind (Louis Pasteur)
* * * * * * *
I came to art thinking the thing or scene well observed was a worthwhile pursuit. I still want to share with the viewer the power of seeing.
***********
The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival.\" (Andre Malraux, \"The Metamorphosis of the Gods\") Writing about the sculptors of the Golden Age of Greek Art (5th C BC), Ernst Gombrich argued in his monumental work \"Art and Illusion\" that by striving for perfection using the human body as their vessel, they had the temerity to rival creation itself.
* * * * * * * *
You put art in the world and it becomes the world. (Frank Silvestry)
* * * * * * * *
You see the world anew every time you go out into it. (Ellen Killen)
* * * * * * * *
\"The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation. \" \"What demarcates aesthetic interest from other sorts is that it involves the appreciation of something for its own sake.\" (Roger Scruton)
* * * * * * * *
Nothing is quite as exhilarating as looking through the camera. There is a pleasure in seeing an arrangement of forms, the light falling on objects, the order of things, or a color that attracts one's attention. Then, too, there is an excitement in moving in, back, or to the side to re-examine that first moment of recognition. Sometimes I crouch, bend on one knee, stand on my tip toes, or bend slightly to see it anew. Suddenly, another angle presents me with possibilities. I release the shutter and all is anticipation, hope and expectation. Afterward, having downloaded the files to the computer, I occasionally regret not having stood further to the right or left or looked down more when, suddenly, I see something for the first time in one of the frames. Look at that! What a pleasant surprise.
* * * * * * * * \"
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.\" (Umberto Eco)
* * * * * * * *
\"...the secret to memorable nonfiction is so often the writer's readiness to be surprised.\" (Ron Suskind)
* * * * * * * *
I remember first seeing the work of the Flemish painters. Who, among all the painters in history, were more enamored of the visible world? I felt admiration for their sheer delectation in describing how things look. A whiff of smoke from an extinguished candle or the texture of fur; for them everything was worth seeing and rendering. In his monumental work on Velazquez, Jonathan Brown wrote of his early genre paintings, \"Characterized by a remarkable sense for the look and feel of people and things, these pictures seem to reach deep into the essence of the visible world and to exalt it.\" (Jonathan Brown, \"In The Shadow of Velazquez\")
* * * * * * * *
\"I don't want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.\" (Agnes Varda)
* * * * * * * *
There are two fundamental sides to my photography - the pleasures of seeing and making and the necessity of promoting. Having spent nearly twenty-five years in the business of representing commercial photographers I recognize the urgency of the former and the strains of the latter.
* * * * * * * *
So often the most intriguing images are those first presented by ordinary, found phenomena. These naturally occurring visual sensations abound and can offer what the painter Stuart Davis called \"the joy of optical exercise\".
* * * * * * * *
Sometimes, people will look at my photographs in the Veils and Rain portfolios and ask how did I manipulate an image to achieve the results before them. The short, glib answer is \"I pressed the shutter.\" True, there is always some post-production work on any digital image, but the key to what I am attempting to explore in these images begins with looking at what is presented to me. *
* * * * * * *
\"Certainty is reassuring but one can only learn by doubting. \" (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
* * * * * * * *
Most of us are beset by doubts at various times, but as the photographer Ray Metzker often expressed to me, it is the artist's lot that he or she must accept, indeed embrace not knowing in order to achieve some breakthrough. To know all beforehand is to risk producing the worst sort of didacticism. The Spanish writer Javier Marias expressed this embrace of the unknown as follows when asked how he begins to write a novel: \"Some writers have a map or a plan. I just have a compass. I more or less know I am heading north, but that's it. I don't know the way. I find out as I write. If I know the whole story, if I know the whole plot of a novel before then I would be bored by writing. I would say what is the point if I know the whole thing. I like to change, to improvise and to find out.\"
* * * * * * * *
There are benefits to old age and wisdom, and perhaps the most important one is the following: when you are young and you reach the end of a series you've been working on, you worry you will never have another good idea. When you are old and you reach the end of a series, you don't know where the next inspiration will come from, but you do know it will come, unexpectedly and serendipitously, but it will come.
* * * * * * * *
There is a marked difference between a compelling object and a compelling vision. When I started the bike series what fascinated me were the objects as cultural phenomena. I was not interested in whole bikes chained to stands, railings or poles; rather, I sought out carcasses -- the remains of bikes forgotten, abandoned, picked over and scavenged - and what they signified about urban life. It didn't take long, however, for me to begin to see these remains as an assemblage of triangles, circles and lines in vivid colors. My perception of them - the vision if you will - had changed.
* * * * * * * *
I've always wanted to make mysterious pictures, all the better when they derive entirely from what lies before me.
* * * * * * * *
I made a photograph several years ago, part of the \"Veils\" series, looking through a fence covered with black fabric, over a huge tract of land being prepared for construction, and toward a neighborhood in Philadelphia known as Northern Liberties. The sky was filled with puffy clouds moving rapidly from west to east. The semi-transparent fabric tempered the details behind it, softening and blending them, rendering the cityscape a silhouette, and the iridescent green plastic fencing used to mark off sections of the tract a series of mysterious, glowing patterns. The whole vista reminded me of Dutch landscape painting, specifically van Ruisdael's views of Haarlem. Images have the power to make us pay attention to the world, its transient appearances and phenomena, and to place ourselves in relation not only to what transpires at that moment but also to how other artists' perceptions of similar appearances and phenomena prepared us to see in the first place. At the moment I made the photograph I was keenly aware how profoundly I felt an affinity for van Ruisdael and the traditions out of which he came and which he was to expand. I named the picture in his honor, \"Northern Liberties from the Development Fields\". (See in the Veils portfolio.)
* * * * * * * * *
\"...art is invention, but also remembering....\" (Robert Hughes)
* * * * * * * * *
The \"shock of the new\"? What I am doing is hardly \"new\" let alone \"shocking\". I am merely trying to look with a keen eye and discover something delightful and mysterious. By \"mysterious\" I mean whenever I look at a picture that draws me in, the confluence of shapes, colors, structure, identities and associations defy full comprehension. Some aspect or element always seems to metamorphose or assert itself or remain unsettled. I never fully grasp its power; rather, it grasps me and only reveals itself slowly, in stages, but never entirely.
* * * * * * * * *
My photographs are an object lesson in paying attention, simply looking, not in making a point.
* * * * * * * * *
We all know realism when we see it; reality is another matter. Who can claim to define that? What compels us to come back to realism in art again and again is how little on close examination such works recreate the external world. Why else would we find them alluring, compelling, or mysterious? Why else would we look at them more than once?
* * * * * * * * *
“The picture is instead of what happens. We don’t need to know the story; generally the story’s trivial anyway. The more people want to know the story, the less they’ll look at the picture.” (Howard Hodgkin)
* * * * * * * * *
\"Looking for one thing he found another.\" (Mark Cousins)
* * * * * * * * *
\"He prefers ambiguity to information.\" (David Park Curry on James McNeil Whistler)
* * * * * * * * *
\"I have to tell you I increasingly look at real things with increasing love.\" (Joan Miro)
* * * * * * * * *
\"I cried because life is hopeless and beautiful.\" (Howard Nemerov from \"The View from the Attic Window\")
* * * * * * * * * *
\"Though leaves are many, the root is one; / Through all the lying days of my youth / I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; / Now I may wither into the truth.\" (W.B. Yeats)
* * * * * * * * * *
\"I don't care a damn about what happens when I'm dead, but I do have a sense of increased urgency. And I think it's made me more courageous.\" (the painter Howard Hodgkin on his last years)
* * * * * * * *
\"Happiness equals reality minus expectations.\" (Tom Magliozzi)
* * * * * * * *
\"The more desperate one is the more one hopes.\" (Miguel de Unamuno)
* * * * * * * *
\"It can be your destiny....not to live up to your destiny, to fall short of it.\" (Geoff Dyer)
* * * * * * * *
If you make a lot of pictures and no one sees them you often feel you haven't made anything. An audience must complete the equation.
* * * * * * * *
The idea of being forgotten fills me with dread.
* * * * * * * *
Whoever thought I would be ambitious at age 78, ambitious for an audience?
* * * * * * *
The consolation of art is survival, but not necessarily immortality.
* * * * * * * *
In the spring of 2024 I finally had to accept I was seen as an amateur, not in the pejorative American sense of second-rate but rather in the English sense of loving what one does. I had to recognize I would never achieve the public breakthrough I sought nor would I receive even the modest appreciation I longed for in my adoptive hometown. I am an artist, of this I have no doubt, but it is a bitter pill to swallow that there is such scant acknowledgment.
* * * * * * * *
Why not me? I got my answer September 18, 2024, but I refuse to just be a casualty.
I am pleased to announce the availability of a limited edition portfolio featuring ten original prints from the \"Mughals & Mugshots\" series, each accompanied by a poem by Rob Wright.
Consisting of signed and dated hand-printed images on Canson Edition Etching Rag, the images along with an introduction and brief biographies of the artists are presented in a handsome linen portfolio case. The edition is limited to 20 copies. The portfolio costs $425 plus shipping and handling and can be purchased by contacting Tom Goodman at tomgoodman1@gmail.com.
To see the portfolio and case online click on \"Portfolios\" above and then on \"Limited Edition Portfolio\"