Peter Goin

Biography

Peter Goin was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1951. He grew up a third culture kid, spending time in Indonesia, Turkey, and Brazil as a child and young adult. Goin received his MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. He moved to Nevada in 1984. He became fascinated with the basin-and-range environment—much of Nevada belongs to the Bureau of Land Management and is removed from private ownership making it open for camping, exploring, and photographing. The focus of his work is the American West and specifically the Nevada landscape.

Intrigued by the effects of humans on the landscape, Goin uses photography to depict landscapes that have been altered. In his book Nuclear Landscapes, Goin presents photographs of various nuclear test sites and power facilities that have been abandoned and the effects these sites and facilities have on the surrounding area. He gained unprecedented access to test sites and facilities in Nevada, Washington, and the South Pacific (as well as risked exposure to radiation and shark attack) in order to examine these unique places. This project investigates and documents evidence of the cultural modification of nuclear landscapes, and includes images at the Nevada Test Site, the Hanford Nuclear Site, the Trinity Site, and the Marshall Islands. Additional series of work include his photographic survey of the Mexican–American border: Tracing the Line, a survey of the border from Brownsville, Texas, to Tijuana, Mexico, that investigates the relationship of the border line to the landscape, including how the boundary line divides the landscape and whether there is a distinction between the human-made and natural landscape; Humanature, in which Goin explores and documents the extent to which people and nature have become a continuum; Black Rock, a detailed analysis and lyrical interpretation of the Black Rock Desert, a previously avoided or neglected region of Nevada that is about the size of Delaware, that shows the visual, physical, and historical complexity of the place; and his narrative photograms, The Pursuit of Happiness, structured loosely on the narrative format, the panels can be read individually or as a whole and reflect the design and concept of Indonesian shadow puppets. Awards for his work include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and at the turn of the new century he was awarded the Governor's Millennium Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Goin's video work has also garnered acclaim. He earned the Best Experimental Documentary Award at the 2001 New York International Film & Video Festival for his video Structures of Everyday Life. Structures weaves together narrative and visual vignettes from months of videotaping a group of Reno, Nevada teens, showing adolescents speaking their views and expressing their desire for acceptance. The program was aired by PBS in 2001. Other videos of Goin's include In Search of Ritual: The Burning Man, which interprets the Burning Man art festival through multiple voices and viewpoints of participants at the 1993 event. In Search of Ritual: The Burning Man was nominated for an EMMY in 1994. Goin has coauthored numerous books as well as served as an editor for several texts.

Selected Books

Selected exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions

Group Exhibitions