Keith Goldstein

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

I live and work In New York City. Some people say that it’s an easy place for “street” photography. All I know is that this place is where I make my home. A place can define you or break you. I have a love/hate affair with my hometown. I long for days passed before gentrification took hold. CBGBs, Tompkins Square Park, … the New York of my youth was dirty, gritty, and damn exciting. It’s a place of rich and poor. Most importantly, it is a place of diversity most unlike any other city in our country. The dreams I had in my youth became waking reality here. Nothing is as strange, unimaginable, truthful, and as real in what takes place everyday on the street. Some have called the streets “theater”. I just say it is what it is. Nothing more, nothing less. It, this, is life. What I feel inside can be echoed in what I see outside. Happiness, sadness, empathy, and the harsh reality of the everyday. That is what I look for. Years ago a subway ride was fifty cents. Today it’s two fifty. The diversity is still here despite efforts to destroy it. New York will always be that way. It is a microcosm of what the rest of the country should be. Tolerant with that “give it to me now” attitude. New Yorkers have no wasted time. Life’s too short. A quote from Robert Frank explains it perfectly for me, “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside.Trying to tell something that’s true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there.”

Artwork