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Press Release | Love, Despair and Longing, Peter E. Goldman - artmedia GALEERY - Miami FL
Paul stays the night | I do not cut, New York, 1965

Artmedia Gallery is proud to present  Love, Despair and Longing. New York-Paris 1962-68, Photographs by Peter Emanuel Goldman, the first exhibition of Goldman's photographic body of work.

Peter Emanuel Goldman was a celebrated filmmaker of the underground cinema and the only American link to the French New Wave during the sixties. At that time, he also started an intermittent career as a journalist. Later, in the seventies, he composed and recorded music. He spent the next fifteen years as a writer and consultant on foreign affairs. Recently, he became a novelist. in 1962, he began to practice straight photography while he was filming Echoes of Silence, his first movie. Simultaneously, he used his still camera to register the kind of life he shared with his friends and his perceptions of New York City, mainly of his neighborhood, Greenwich Village. In 1966, he settled in Paris temporarily. For almost fifty years, his negatives were forgotten and kept in storage in the US and Paris. Several months ago they reappeared in a box sent to him from Paris.

Goldman’s small and compact negative archive introduces an unknown chapter in the history of American photography from the early to the middle sixties and immediately beyond. Sex, love, desire, passion, drugs, nightlife, sadness, despair, loneliness have its place in this archive. A sensibility that approximates Goldman's would not appear in photography until the following decade with Nan Goldin, the photographer of “sexual dependency.”

Goldman's straight photography and film—chiefly Echoes of Silence—are close thematically. Both are autobiographical in a certain way, not literally, but more extensively they recount the life of a group of young people searching for pleasure, intense feeling, and understanding. There is also a visual connection between them. Goldman worked night and day with his still camera preferably using ambient light. At night, with scant lighting, he underexposed the negative to increase its sensitivity and achieve high contrasts. A dark atmosphere, displacement of focus, extreme close-ups, spontaneity, irregular framing, were Goldman's resources for narrating the intense drama of youth.

About the artist:

Peter Emanuel Goldman (New York,1939) made several films in the sixties, such as Echoes of Silence (1964), Pestilent City (1965), The Sensualists (1965) and Wheel of Ashes (1968). He worked as a journalist and a writer of international affairs. He made one LP record with his songs in 1975. In 2015, he will present two new creative projects: the publication of his first novel, Last Métro to Bleecker Street and his first personal photo-exhibition at ArtMedia Gallery, Miami.

About the curator:

José Antonio Navarrete has developed an extensive international career as a curator, researcher, and critic of visual arts and culture. His lengthy bibliography focuses on topics of modern and contemporary art, with emphasis on how media technology has affected and transformed art practices. As an artist, he recently presented his first solo exhibition, What images can do, in Artmedia Gallery.

About the gallery:

Artmedia Gallery was founded in 2012. Located in the Wynwood Art District in Miami, Florida, the gallery’s mission is to exhibit and promote contemporary art. One of the gallery’s central objectives is to explore the vast possibilities of the expanded notion of art thru media technology, with photography and video as its core interest.