Artist's Statement

My earliest aesthetic experiences took place in nature. Solitary, in a summer-green, field, as a child, I was awed by the vast beauty of sky and land. I have always felt a resonance between my visual perceptions of landscape and my own reveries. We all have a sense of our inner psychic space as well as an internal geography of our bodies. Landscape reflects and mirrors this sense of self.

Escaping from narrow definitions of landscape as merely picturesque and landscape as genre, my photographs are a means of expressing the connection between the external world and our internal, subjectively felt universe.

Edith Gould, New York, 2005

I am attracted to derelict places, places of ruin, ancient, sacred, commonplace, that are mysterious remnants of lives lived. I try to use the camera as a probe, to yield up some small element, a visual voice of a culture that has disappeared. Famine cottages in Ireland or graffiti covered walls in an abandoned bath house in Rockaway NY…a kind of archaeology that has always fascinated me. The photograph itself is a re-finding and a re-enlivening of what has existed in the past.

Edith Gould, 2006