DeCordova Collects Photographs: Recent Acquisitions
Stephen Golding
Stephen Golding's Grover Cronin is one of ten works which make up the series A View from the Back of the Bus. In this series, the artist explores the psychological toll of racism in America. His images of slavery, lynchings, discrimination, and cultural exclusion trace a rough history of the experience of African-Americans in this country. This history is not presented in traditional documentary style, but in an expressionist format that stresses the visceral, emotional qualities of 500 years of terror and persecution. Golding creates his photographs with an involved multi-media process. After planning a rough design, he scans black-and-white photographs into computer software where he selects, arranges, and manipulates each picture. The images are then output as photographic negatives, which are then processed as black-and-white photographic prints. Golding hand-colors these prints with a variety of media, and scans their images back into the computer for further manipulation. Finally, the pictures are output as color transparencies and printed as Cibachromes. The entire A View From the Back of the Bus series was shown in DeCordova's exhibition The Computer in the Studio (1994).
