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Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Lynn Goldsmith: In The Looking Glass

Lynn Goldsmith challenges identity and perception with a body of self-portraits that she has been creating, assembling and crafting for more than 10 years

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Zip-A-Dee-Du-Dah

“There are a number of them that come from fairy tales and myths,” she says, “obviously, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Mirror, Mirror… I would then investigate what those things mean. For example, Little Red Riding Hood. I think Little Red Riding Hood sent out this message, beware of the wolf, blah, blah, blah, but when I look at it and question what effect this fairy tale had on me as a kid, I think, ‘Why was she wearing red? They didn’t wear red cloaks then. Red is a sign of seduction. And the wolf, maybe she was out there seducing the wolf.’ My brain goes off into other areas. For me, I start learning and reinterpreting. The footman is screaming at Cinderella in my own brain. There are a lot of little jokes, but there’s really a kind of study for me of what various fables and popular culture and mass media and Hollywood cinematography—what effect those have had on us. There’s a lot of thought that goes into each one.”

So with so many influences and leaps of imagination and internal narrative, it’s no wonder that there’s so much variation in look, style and mood from one image to another. In the course of this project, Goldsmith has assumed so many personas that it makes you wonder which one, if any, is the real Lynn Goldsmith.

“Each one is different,” she says, “but I can tell you that the brain wants to know that. And that’s the thing that I’m fighting, saying that there’s no such thing as fixed identity. People want to put their handle on it. I’m trying to break limiting thought patterns, and I think the digital world has opened that up for us. For a lot of people, particularly older people, the digital world immediately puts them into a state of fear because it’s new. And young people, their brains are just open to it. They don’t need to know the why, where or how, they just flow right into it. And in my own way, these are things that I’m addressing through the work.”

Adds Goldsmith, “The point is really that it’s just me, or that it’s just one person in particular, and the fact that I change age, I change gender, I change race, is to point out that there’s no such thing as a fixed identity. I used to rail against the title that would often be given to me of rock ’n’ roll photographer because I photographed a lot of other kinds of people, much less I did travel work and photojournalism, so I hated being pigeonholed. But I understood that people need to identify you as something.”

How much of each finished image was there in the store display and how much came from Goldsmith’s imagination? It seems like a logical question for the viewer to consider when faced with these fantastic scenarios. And that’s Lynn Goldsmith’s point.


See more of Lynn Goldsmith’s Looking Glass photos at www.lynngoldsmith.com.