2015 SPA jury member statement
Rafael Goldchain uses photography to tell him who he is. The medium is an instrument that validates the truth of his personal experience and his relationship to the external world. The outside world his lens records, stands in for a richly layered interior self. Goldchain’s images are literal and psychological character studies. In ‘I Am My Family’, an extraordinary series of black and white photographs, he transformed himself into the members, men and women alike, of his European family, many of whom were killed in the Holocaust. The series was both a quest for and an affirmation of a profound cultural and familial identity. Whatever Goldchain photographs, whether a mother and child in Jerusalem, a recently married couple in Oaxaca, Mexico, a portrait of his Irish wife and her two sisters, or a cracked and weathered pillar, his subjects are a moving affirmation of his place in the world. Their careful resolution acts as a poignant reminder of his, and our own, mortality.
- Robert Enright