Robert Golden

Robert Golden began his career shooting photojournalistic assignments in the USA and England, and indeed his original intention was to be purely a photojournalist. Then for reasons explained below, he turned to what on the face of it seems a polar opposite — still-life food photography. He became on of Europe’s best known food photographers, shooting at the top end of the advertising world, and inevitably in that business expanded into television commercials. He went on to direct over 850 commercials, winning numerous awards. We met a long time ago in Washington DC on a project that was neither photojournalism nor studio work, brought together by an art director friend, David Larkin, who hired both of us to photograph the National Air and Space Museum, a huge project that took many weeks. More recently, Robert has returned to documentary reportage, but making films more than shooting still images. Now that the lines are becoming blurred between the two, I thought it would be interesting to talk to someone at the top of their profession who has embraced two pairs of contrasts: photojournalism and studio shooting, also still and film. Robert’s first feature film was chosen as Best of the Festival, Edinburgh, and selected for Sundance amongst others. And he has filmed over thirty documentaries winning several awards. Presently an exhibition of photographs and films called HOME is touring the United Kingdom and he has established an on-line cinema called Objective Cinema for documentary films.

MF: How did you start your career?

RG: As a child I was devoted to drawing and painting. At the age of 8, I was nominated and sent to a weekly art course at the cities main art museum. There for the first time I saw the murals of Diego Rivera which celebrate human achievement and labour and how all things are united from the seeds of plants to the production of cars. It was thrilling and helped me to decide at such a tender age that art was to be my salvation.

Around the age of 12, I saw a series of pictures from the Pacific during World War Two by W. Eugene Smith in a commemorative edition of Life magazine. The images amazed me. I was riveted by the dense backs and the seeming infinity of detail, but more by the tough, clear-eyed empathy of the images. Here were photographs that were very moving, informative and beautiful to look at. I began to understand the notion of storytelling. I surrendered my crayons for the American art of photography. In the last three years of high school I won more awards for my photographs in an annual national competition then anyone else in the country, which was, of course, an encouragement. Three days after I graduated university, I left the Midwest for New York. I had 60 bucks in my pocket, a Nikon with one lens and a portfolio. Two days after arriving I got my first job from a music publisher and I was off and have not stopped since.

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MF: And your first love was reportage photography?

RG: My driving passions were to create beauty and to turn over the rocks and expose the truth to others. My heroes were Smith, Paul Strand and Edward Weston. There were many others whom I had studied and whom had influenced me but Smith’s Caravaggio-like beauty and the depth of his dark visual poetry, Strand’s humanism and Weston’s struggle to be an artist, of loving life and women that together created guidelines for an otherwise unformed and searching youth. My dream from the age of 12 was to join Magnum.

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MF: You make the point very clearly on your website that you objected to the way your documentary images were being used by editors. Can you elaborate?

RG: When I moved to Britain I began shooting book covers for most of the major publishers but I wanted to work as a photojournalist. Eventually I got some breaks and did many articles for major magazines and newspapers. I felt strongly about two things: the first was that my responsibility was to tell the stories of the people who allowed me into their lives as truthfully and as clearly as possible.
The second was that I was responsible to give those people a voice that would otherwise not be heard. In this I would argue with the art directors about which pictures should be used and in what order and size. This did not go down well.

MF: It sounds like you were taking Eugene Smith’s example in more ways than one! Can you give a specific example of how that happened – and why?

RG: I had shot for weeks on a story for Nova magazine about Brixton in south London. I was so devoted to the story that I worked well beyond what the magazine was wiling to pay me for. One Saturday I was asked to attend a meeting in the editorial offices. When I arrived I found the art director, the editor and several others assembled around the meeting table. The art director threw my contacts onto the table and asked what I thought I was doing. I was confused. He asked when I was last in New York. I asked: ‘what was that to do with my contacts?’ He said that it was clearly impossible that my pictures could have been shot in London as the conditions in the images were so appalling. I must be trying to pass off pictures from Harlem.

I remember them distinctly talking about how they had expected pictures of the exotic Caribbean market and of the beautiful houses waiting to be emptied of their occupants so middle class people could buy into the area.

They did use the article, which was the largest ever published photo essay in any British magazine. But scenes like these got worse and in the end I could no longer pretend that I could provide the voiceless a voice in such publications.

MF: Turning to still-life, and in particular food, it seems almost like a hand-brake turn.

RG: I continued to shoot self-motivated photojournalistic work and produced ten books for children called THE PEOPLE WORKING SERIES. In the late 90’s I returned to photojournalism but this time with a video camera. In between I needed to make a living and turned away from working for the magazines and newspapers. I wanted to be able to do something that was innocent, that would not compromise the lives of others. I asked what was the furthest creative distance I could travel? From a Leica to a 10×8, from any light to only light that I switched on, from the entire world around me to only whatever I chose and placed in front of the camera…still life.

I went through magazines searching for still-life pictures which I admired, tore them out and examined them with a magnifying glass to figure out where the light came from, what shape it was and how the light was balanced for contrast.
Soon I was shooing many more book covers and one day I asked the art director at Penguin, with whom I shot many covers, if I could have a crack at a cookery cover. He agreed and I suggested doing a wraparound designed. This went down well and was considered an American import.

In the meantime I was being told that I had to specialize in one sort of still life or another: beauty products, jewelry, black boxes, liquids, food etc. Not being acquisitive nor interested in fashion and loving all of the facets of food from the raw material through to the cooked dishes and its metaphor of generosity, conviviality, and love I had no choice and in fact rejoiced in the decision.

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MF: And your still life work is exquisite – I’d say lyrical myself. Surely you needed to balance that with the tougher edge of reportage?

RG: I brought to still life several different influences that served as a platform for the styles that I evolved. First, I had studied something called intellectual history in university, and that influenced the way in which I understand the connectivity of science, the arts, military and political events, economics and public heath within any historical moment. These historical/material developments gave rise to ways of thinking in the arts and especially in the visual arts. I know this sounds remote but it was not for me. It brought me to ask what was the meaning or importance of an object to people in the past. My answers provided me a sense of the things I put in front of my camera. An Iranian glass jug or Chinese dried squid would become filled with the meaning relevant to people’s lives as well being and abundance, the tentative nature of life, wealth or struggle. These emotions gave rise to a sense of light, colour and form.

Second, my documentary background influenced me in understanding that things are a part of life, not separate from it. When I started making still life I noticed in the work of others that objects were placed in a finite frame… .the world that surrounded the object ended at the edge of frame. That did not work for me. I wanted to indicate that the frame was a part of the rest of the world filled with life, children and barking dogs. I began to think of my single frame as one from a film where the camera had panned and seen the rest of life around the object to its left and right. This idea of connecting the object to the world, to think of its setting as a part of lived life, brought a new look to still life.

 

Finally, I was and am a lover of light. Light excites me; I find it fills me with wonder and to me it is often a participant in the way I experience things and thus it becomes a proactive force in my life.

In my film work I think of light as an active participant, another character in the scene. While this is a personal preoccupation, it led me to the idea of mixing the sources and colour of light in my still life work. Instead of the ubiquitous north light then commonly used in tabletop work, I began to balance different sources with different colours to create a less ‘perfect’ but more naturalistic look in the studio. In some sense this was a return to the imperfect world of photo-journalism in which I never had influence nor control over the strip lights above the bar, the tungsten in the sitting area and the cold white light behind the plastic shields on the beer pumps. A person could have three different colours of light on their face while buying a pint. Of course what I did in the studio was carefully considered and highly controlled, but it did create another look.

MF: But even within the studio genre, there’s a distinct difference between your commercial shooting and personal (or so it seems to me). Is the commercial work really buttoned down and art directed before it comes to you, or do you get to have a say on ideas and treatment?

RG: My commercial shooting was always an expression of the needs of the layout, the sales message and the underpinnings of my style. I was never a jobbing photographer because my style was so present. For instance, it was rare that I would be asked to shoot something on a white or black background because the ‘creatives’, who understand so little about what happens in front of the camera, thought that there was a mystery about shooting against white or black which differed from shooting in more detailed settings. Most of my clients expected me to influence the final look of the ad.

But a distinction exists between what one can do within the realm of commercial art, which is always and only serving the message of the product, and what one can do serving ideas not bound up with enhancing a company’s profits, the needs of the ‘creatives’ and the influences of accountants and sales managers.

I developed a pattern in which, between commissions, I would experiment in the studio with new styles, techniques and ideas. I would utilize these in an editorial assignment where, generally, I was free to do as I wished. Thereafter an agency would often ask if I could shoot a campaign along those lines. In that way, there was a relationship between pure creativity and the commercial work.

 

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MF: Is that how your interest in film started – doing studio commercials?

RG: When I was in high school, a close friend of mine, who had influenced my intellectual development, went to film school in New York. I visited him once while he was shooting his graduation film and I was attacked by the film virus.

While in university, where I studied both photograph and intellectual history, I took my third year in England to study film and had decided that ultimately I wanted to direct feature films. For various reasons I first pursued documentary photography and my dream to join Magnum. When I realized that was not to be (I was invited but then rejected because I was accused of being too political), I became a still-life photographer. After several successful years, agencies began to offer me commercials to shoot as part of a stills/film package. That gave me the hope that I would find the skills and talent to succeed in commercials and thus lead me to features.

 

Although I have made two creatively successful but financially disastrous features, I became more drawn to documentaries as though I was being driven back to my first love. Since the late 90’s I have shot over 30 documentaries, mostly about food and culture, music and theatre.

MF: When and how did you decide to concentrate on film? Do you find it more effective in getting your committed points across than, say, a gallery show or a book?

RG: My first love is photography. My involvement with it led me to a much bigger life than I would have otherwise had and it has allowed me to see into many people’s worlds. At the moment I have an exhibition called HOME that has been in three venues in England and has been well received. I have another exhibition in development called LEVELS OF INTIMACY about a photographer’s relationship to the world. Both need to be both exhibition and a book because those forms of storytelling each have their own unique power and intimacy.

 

Film has other qualities and often a larger audience, but of course, at its center is photography. The practice of making stills and film are very different, although they overlap. An exhibition, a book and a photo essay, just as a film, each needs its storytelling elements to be thought about and marshalled, needs rhythm and flow, continuities and through-lines of ideas to be made clear, but there is a vast difference when accounting for movement in film and the singularity of the stills image. Lately, in my last couple of films I have begun to break down the differences by using stills in definite dramatic ways in my editing. I have begun to have my stills camera as a part of my film kit and use it often.

 

Seeing my films projected in front of an audience on a big screen is a thrill, but so too is seeing people lean forward looking into a print on a gallery wall or telling me how they enjoyed my book. All of it fills me with wonder.

MF: You’ve always maintained an intensity for the issues you care about, and I see that you’re now including food and diet. Is there an ‘umbrella’ concern that motivates you?

RG: I was brought up in the 60’s and was a part of the generation which fought for racial equality and against the Vietnam war and which believed that we could change the world. Although older and a bit wiser, I am still motivated by wanting a fair, democratic world where all of our children can grow up with health, freedom of choice, safety and an equal access to education, an equal protection under law and in everything else, and have absolutely equal opportunity.

I am motivated by believing that culture is the only tool we have available to us to transform our lives and beliefs, and that culture is the balm that calms our savage instincts and helps to secure a civilized bond between us and overcomes the things which otherwise can separate us. Finally, for personal reasons, I abhor bullies, whether individuals, groups, gangs or the state.

These underlying beliefs fuel my interest in different stories, from how music can express a society’s need to recover from a war, to how transnational corporations use food to both stuff and starve us. All the subjects are united by a love and respect for others and a rage against the irrationality of the supposedly rational system we live within.

 

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W. Eugene Smith said that he was the messenger; John Berger said that the job of art is to make the invisible visible; and Joan Miro said, “I understand that an artist is someone who, in the the midst of others’ silence, uses his own voice to say something and makes sure that what he says is not useless but something that is useful to mankind.”

Robert’s book HOME that accompanies the exhibition is available here:
http://robertgoldenpictures.tbpcontrol.co.uk/tbp.direct/customeraccesscontrol/home.aspx?d=robertgoldenpictures&s=C&r=10000123&ui=0&bc=0
…and his films on the new Objective Cinema project is here:
www.objectivecinema.net/showcase