John Goodman: Moments Abstracted
John Goodman : Moments Abstracted
Boston-based photographer John Goodman has aimed his lens on provocative subjects and places in Havana, Tuscany, Las Vegas, Nashville, Coney Island and Boston. The results are the alluring, unfiltered and tender works featured in Moments Abstracted. Goodman exhibits a selection from his acclaimed book The Times Square Gym that captures athletes from all walks of life. The arresting images question our perception—the faces of subjects are grainy and blurred, bodies disintegrate into light as they dance about the ring, the gym becomes an ambiguous, even haunting environment. Another highlight is the Combat Zone series, primarily taken in the ‘70s and composed of gritty, compassionate and testosterone-imbued images that capture Boston’s notorious adult entertainment area. Goodman’s works drift between abstraction and reality; they are incomplete sentences in the artist’s ongoing search for transcendent, yet inevitably fleeting moments. For this photographer, beauty lies within life’s contradictions: power and grace, light and darkness, youth and old age, stillness and motion, the refined and the raw. Moments Abstracted surveys Goodman’s career through 40 photographs, mostly black and white, which span from 1969 to 2007.
Goodman is on the faculty of the Art Institute of Boston and also an instructor at the Maine Media Workshops. His photographs are in the permanent collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Art Institute of Chicago.
