Neil Goldberg: Other People's Prescriptions

Artist: Neil Goldberg

Author: Louis Menand

Publisher: Esopus Books (2019)

Over the past 25 years, New York–based artist Neil Goldberg (born 1963) has created videos, photographs, mixed-media works and performance pieces on the subjects of embodiment, sensing, mortality and the everyday―or, as the New York Timeshas noted, "the extraordinary, glimpsed in the ordinary."

For this new series―and Goldberg’s first published monograph―the artist photographed a number of bespectacled New Yorkers from behind in order to afford viewers a glimpse of the city through their corrective lenses. Other People’s Prescriptions traffics in the congenial voyeurism that informs so much of Goldberg’s practice. Whether his (often unwitting) subjects are perusing the contents of a bodega’s salad bar, emerging from a subway, carrying groceries, or checking an email on their iPhone through bifocals, Goldberg manages, through his trademark combination of conceptual rigor and deep empathy, to celebrate their humanity while encouraging us to recognize our own.