Dan Goldman’s latest photo exhibit doesn’t whisper—it withholds. “This Ain’t Your Land,” now on view at Convey/er/or Gallery in Poughkeepsie through
June 1, features a series of striking portraits of anonymous subjects shielding their faces with slips of paper. These are not acts of modesty or mystique. These are refusals. Refusals to be seen, to be claimed, to be archived, to be erased.
“I consider myself an activist artist,” Goldman says. “I’m not trying to make beautiful pictures. I’m trying to make images that demand engagement with what’s happening right now.”
The title, of course, rewrites the inclusive gospel of Woody Guthrie into a protest hymn. This land ain’t your land—not if you’re undocumented, not if you’re Indigenous, not if you’re on the wrong end of a border drawn in ink and blood. Goldman’s work delivers a visual rebuke to the myth of American inclusivity, offering a quieter, tenser landscape, where survival demands invisibility and resistance is often silent.
Shot in black-and-white, the photographs have the stillness of mid-century documentary work but hum with contemporary unease. That’s no accident. Goldman cites Dorothea Lange as an influence—specifically her impulse to bear witness with a lens and a conscience. “There’s something about that era’s visual language that still speaks to this moment,” Goldman says. “But instead of faces of suffering, we have covered faces. Not because there’s nothing to say, but because the system won’t listen.”
In one image after another, a man stands in a sunlit field, body square to the camera, face partially obscured by a blank piece of paper. In another, a person’s face has been washed away like a wave on the sand. It’s protest by redaction. Each photo confronts the viewer with what’s missing—and dares them to fill in the silence.
Goldman began this series in response to the surge in anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy over the last decade. “I was seeing people disappear—figuratively and literally—from the American conversation,” he says. “And I felt like the only way to respond was to build a kind of visual record that acknowledged their presence without exposing them to further harm.”
There’s a long tradition of artists responding to national trauma with metaphor and myth. Goldman goes another way. His myth is already broken. His metaphor doesn’t hide the message—it carries it, blank-faced, toward the camera, like a protestor who won’t give you their name.
An artist talk with Goldman will be held at Convey/er/or Gallery on May 18 at 3pm. Bring your questions—and maybe a blank piece of paper.
This article appears in May 2025.
