“I have been collecting images since 1970. That summer I went on a 6 week teen bus tour of the United Sates with my first SLR, a Yashica Electro X, and brought back thousands of images with the idea of creating a body of painted work. This never materialized but my love of art and photography has grown larger every year.“
Ira Goldstein has had a strong interest in art since 1968 when his father opened his first art materials store changing Ira’s life forever in many ways. In high school, he took many art classes as well as four years of photography classes. Taking full advantage of everything New York had to offer, he frequented galleries and art museums while working at his father’s store. This allowed him opportunities to meet many artists and discuss their work and concepts.
In 1973, Ira began a four-year program in professional photography at Rochester Institute of Technology. The program at RIT taught him more than just the actual making of photographs; it also covered the chemistry, the physics, and the business side of photography. In 1977, Ira graduated with a BS in Photography and immediately put down his camera for six years, choosing the family business over commercial photography.
In 1983, he picked up his old Nikon F2 when his son, Michael, was born and has not put it down since. Over the following years, he became a commercial photographer due to the expense of outsourcing the photography when he and his brother went into mail order. He was then elected Chief (and only) Photographer using a RB 67 medium format camera and studio strobe lights in his basement at home which only had a 7-foot high ceiling, making the shots sometimes challenging to do.
Over the years, Ira has had many opportunities to travel, taking him to Asia, Europe, Africa, North and South America, the North Pole and South Pole. He has amassed a great many images and continues to travel and to visit art museums and galleries, constantly being inspired. In 2011, he set out on a project to merge his images from years of travel with studio photographs of models. Although the concepts and methods have constantly changed, he continues on this journey as each session’s images lead to new directions. He calls his photos his make-believe series and continues this journey to create images with his artistic sensibilities based on years of observation, study, and picture making.