Howard Yezerski Gallery
460 Harrison Ave A16
Boston, MA 02118

September 6 - October 15, 2019

not recent is a selection of photographs taken in the streets of the late twentieth century Boston which vividly contrasts a stark urban landscape with the intensity and exuberance of city life. Rendered in moody black and white tones as well as a rich spectrum of color, the images reveal the many ways in which Goodman was examining his home town.

As a young photographer, Goodman set up a studio in the “Roof” of the Bradford Hotel located in the theater district. He had recently completed his studies with the renowned black and white photographer Minor White. At a time when color photography was not readily accepted as fine art, Goodman began experimenting with a variety of film stocks and exploring the color process to make meaning of the cultural landscape as he created his own voice as an artist.

Many of the silver gelatin monochromatic photographs were taken in the infamous “Combat Zone”, a district adjacent to Goodman’s studio. The images describe the unique diversity of the neighborhood as well as the daily challenges experienced in an area designated for adult entertainment. The archival pigment color photographs read as contemplative, surreal and even uncanny, reflecting Goodman’s talent in capturing sensations as well as quintessential moments.

Exhibition catalog here

BLACK WHITE + BLUE

PhoPa Gallery
132 Washington Avenue
Portland, Maine

January 3 - February 22, 2014

View the exhibition press release here.

"This is no snatched kiss. It's an extraordinarily complex and well-composed photograph shot with the final print in mind. It is the soft white of her body against his chiseled dark form, the shape of the lovers' form on the sand, and the cacophony of textures and values that Goodman orchestrates into a symphony of formal brilliance." - Dan Kany, Maine Sunday Telegram

BLACK WHITE + BLUE

Caldbeck Gallery
12 Elm Street
Rockland, Maine

July 10 - August 10, 2013

Exhibition catalog, click here

"John Goodman's photographic prints are incomparably luscious. The idea of an aesthetic texture such as Goodman's exquisitely soupy grains is like brushwork. In some artist's hands...style begins with the smallest bits in their pictures – the brush strokes...." -Dan Kany, Maine Sunday Telegram

NAKED BEFORE THE CAMERA

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue 
New York City
March 27–September 9, 2012

Couple, 327 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, June 1976 

"I was walking up Commonwealth Avenue in Boston at the end of a warm day in June 1976. I heard music coming from an open second floor window and as I looked up I saw a nude couple. At the same time, they saw me with my camera and said "hey come on up" and I said "come on down." They did and I made this portrait."

-John Goodman

Roberta Smith's review in the New York Times of "Naked before the Camera"
Press Release, click here

MOMENTS ABSTRACTED

UMaine Museum of Art
40 Harlow Street 
Bangor, ME
April 6- June 9, 2012

Exhibition images, click here

George Kinghorn's curatorial statement, click here
Peggy Roalf's interview with John in Design Arts Daily

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.

ECHO

Howard Yezerski Gallery
460 Harrison Avenue 
Boston, MA
February 10 - April 17, 2012

Peggy Roalf's interview with John in Design Arts Daily
Exhibition images, click here
Press Release, click here

“A constant in all Goodman's work is his connection to people and his ability to photograph them during the moments when they are most revealed. He captures the boxer lost in thought, the ballet dancer preparing for her moment onstage, a gospel singer in song, the couple who have playfully shed their clothes on a summer day to pose for his camera. Goodman's world is one in which oppositions become dualities-one can't exist without the other.”

-Bonnell Robinson / Director of Exhibitions Art Institute of Boston

THE SAME DARK PLACE

Scott Nichols Gallery
49 Geary Street
San Francisco, CA
March 1- April 28, 2012

A student of the influential abstract expressionist Minor White, John Goodman credits White with teaching him the difference between seeing and looking...Joyce Carol Oates offers, “Goodman’s camera, however, is not an instrument of detachment, analysis, or judgment, but an iris of an eye that is our own, dissolving ostensible barriers between objects and subject. His intention is to make us feel, and not merely see, the world of the Times Square Gym.”

Peggy Roalf's interview with John in Design Arts Daily 

EXPOSED: Voyeurism, Surveillance and The Camera Since 1870

SF MOMA
San Francisco, CA 
October 30, 2010 - April 17, 2011

”John Goodman, an American living in Boston who was a student of Minor White, took some especially direct pictures of a woman of the streets displaying herself - an abruptly different approach from the more self-engaged work of his mentor. Goodman in the seventies is the opposite of Harry Callahan, a painfully shy man who in 1950 made photographs of women in the street from a great distance and enlarged them.”

- Sandra S. Phillips, curator emerita at SFMOMA, excerpt from the exhibition monograph

BOSTON COMBAT ZONE

Howard Yezerski Gallery
460 Harrison Avenue
Boston, MA
February 12 - March 16, 2010

[Goodman's "The Schlitz Boys"] photograph shows a carload of young men carbuncular with a couple of six packs. They're ready for some action. The animal rictus on the face of the blond guy in the backseat is way beyond Arbus. It's like something shot by a war photographer, only there's no war going on. There is a transaction going on, though, or at least the anticipation of one. In the business of sex, as in any other kind, a supply side can't exist without a demand side.

-Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe, March 7, 2010

WBUR Radio Boston review
Mark Feeney's Boston Globe newspaper / text only
Greg Cook's Boston Phoenix review
Cindy Wright's "Power and the Photograph: an essay"

MOVING PICTURES

Howard Yezerski Gallery
460 Harrison Avenue
Boston, MA
February 10th - March 11th 2008

"Most of Goodman's photos move, suggesting a speedy ride through the country...But it's those pauses that give the show its expressive rhythm." 

- excerpt from Cate McQuaid's Boston Globe review

BOXERS AND BALLERINAS

JOHN GOODMAN

The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University
September 9 – October 31, 2004 

"...for John Goodman the gesture is the equivalent of the human voice. Hands abound in his images-fretful, poised, world-weary, guarded-and in their shape, in the kind and amount of tension they carry, we come to know the person to whom they're connected. Goodman makes us the reader of human signs. 

Throughout his career, John Goodman has invited contradictions. His photography marries the tumult of personality with the symmetry of design, the visceral with the deliberate, guts with formality. By embracing these contradictions he has given us a body of work that compels us to see."

- excerpt from Christopher Millis's exhibition catalog essay

Bonnell Robinson's Curatorial Statement
Big Red & Shiny's Review 
Christopher Millis's Essay
artsMEDIA Review

TOWARD SUMMER

June Bateman Fine Art
560 Broadway, Soho, NY
April 22 – June 5, 2004 

"Goodman over-uses blur and jarring out-of-register effects, but his results are often so moody, sexy and intriguing that you don't mind. Although his best shots here are of street and beach scenes in Havana, a number of fragmented portraits--hands, eyes, a neck, a torso, a gesture--make us curious to see what comes next. June Bateman Gallery, 560 Broadway."

-Vince Aletti, Village Voice