Matthew Golden

“Our property seems to me the most beautiful in the world. It is so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the noise and dust.” -Letter written to the King of Persia by unknown author, 539 B.C.

My work investigates the vernacular landscapes of where I come from and live in. I make photographs that explore the contemporary American ethos as it relates to issues of land use, community, and construction of our inhabited environment.

Through wandering visual exploration, my projects document the landscape in order to discover the truths and myths tied up in social, political, and geographical place. I am most concerned with the geography of sprawl; how the methods used to settle the frontier of the periphery mark and give uniqueness to that landscape.  These places of perpetual flux are the result of an everlasting desire for the new, yet at the same time demonstrate the unfaltering need for contemporary civilizations to tame, control, and define our spaces of habitation. Recently I have been committed to making photographs that explore the suburban state of mind through the cultural landscape of those of us who dwell there.

The images I create expose the disconnection between reality and desire, explore the distance between the future and the present, and celebrate poetic banality revealed within the realm of unfamiliar beauty.