John Goto, a talented photographer known for his unconventional and thought-provoking work, has sadly passed away at the age of 74 due to hypersensitivity pneumonitis. One of his notable projects, titled “West End Blues”, involved a series of photographs featuring himself and his wife Celia, a psychoanalyst, posing in front of restaurants and theatres in London’s vibrant Soho district. They donned costumes ranging from the end of World War I to the Vietnam conflict era. Goto then used Photoshop to remove their figures from the images, creating negative silhouettes reminiscent of the shadows left behind after a nuclear blast.
Each photograph in the series was named after a renowned jazz musician who had performed in London between 1919 and 1974, such as Louis Armstrong, Ken “Snakehips” Johnson, and Adelaide Hall. Many of these musicians were black and had migrated to the city. The 17 images in “West End Blues” were intriguingly problematic. While they resembled street photography, the subjects were actually meticulously posed rather than captured spontaneously. The Gotos appeared faded and two-dimensional, while the backgrounds behind them were vividly three-dimensional. The photographs aimed to appear archival, yet possessed a contemporary feel. Moreover, the images had been openly and joyfully manipulated using computer software. When Goto transformed the series into an augmented reality walking tour accessible through mobile phones, purist critics were taken aback.
However, this discomfort was intentional. Goto’s affection for musicians like Armstrong was born from his youthful visits to Soho to listen to jazz. Just as these musicians viewed London as an escape from their homelands, Goto saw his journeys to hear them perform as a means of liberation from the monotonous English provinces.
Goto’s career began in 1981, where he held his first solo exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery. Born in Stockton, near Manchester, to Bernard Glithero, an engineer, and Catherine (nee Craig), a housewife, he moved with his family to Berkshire during his childhood. After attending a grammar school in Windsor, which he disliked, Goto enrolled in the Berkshire College of Art in Maidenhead in 1965. He then pursued painting at St Martin’s School of Art in London, where he discovered a lasting passion for cinema. Walerian Borowczyk’s film “Goto, l’île d’amour” (1969) left a profound impact on Goto, leading him to adopt the island’s name for himself.
The hybrid nature of the images in “West End Blues” hinted at another kind of permanence. Although their locations appeared haphazard, Goto diligently researched each setting, unearthing their historical significance. For instance, the Chinese restaurant featured in the photograph named “Sidney Bechet” stood on the site where Bechet performed in 1919 at the Royal Philharmonic Hall. In a similar vein, the apartment building in the image “Shake Keane and Ambrose Campbell” had once housed the Abalabi Club. Goto remarked, “My West End is populated by the memories of past musicians and forgotten sounds. But are they truly lost? I firmly believe that on a quiet night, as dawn approaches, the attentive listener can still catch whispers of Rent House Stomp or Yolanda.”
Goto’s inclination for blurring traditional categories surfaced early in his career. In 1981, he held his first solo exhibition, a retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery featuring 60 photographs taken over the previous decade. Unusually, the exhibition was publicized with a movie poster crafted by Andrzej Klimowski, a graphic artist and occasional filmmaker who was also Goto’s friend from St Martin’s. The exhibition included its own soundtrack, featuring voices speaking Czech and Polish.
In 1978, Goto embarked on an extended scholarship in Prague, a city that he described as “on the cusp of the past and present.” This experience heightened his sense of identity as a European photographer and fueled his frustration with the postwar dominance of American photography in Europe. Throughout his career, Goto frequently incorporated elements of Russian constructivism and the Bauhaus movement into his art.
A year before his time in Prague, Goto taught evening photography classes at a youth center in Lewisham, South London. He felt a kinship with his predominantly black students, much like his connection with jazz musicians. The previous year had witnessed riots at the Notting Hill carnival, and an August National Front march led to the infamous “Battle of Lewisham.” Goto recalled that young black people were being unjustly criminalized, and there was no space given to accounts of their cultural experiences. Eager to change that, he captured portraits of his students in a nearby dance hall next to the youth center.
Sadly, these portraits received little attention at the time. It was not until 2013 that the series, titled “Lovers’ Rock, Lewisham Dancehall Portraits, 1977,” was finally exhibited at Art Jericho in Oxford as part of a larger exhibition called “1977: Lewisham & Belleville.” The Belleville images were taken during Goto’s time in Paris on a British Council scholarship. To accompany the show, the Lewisham photographs were compiled into a book called “Lovers’ Rock,” which featured several essays, including one by Lady Young of Hornsey. She noted that the portraits were more than just a counterpoint to images of black youth involved in riots. Goto acknowledged that he felt a deep resonance with his subjects and recognized the struggles he, too, had experienced within himself.
In 1980, Goto relocated to Oxford, where he lived for the rest of his life. He taught at Oxford Polytechnic, later known as Oxford Brookes University, for two decades. During lunch breaks, he would show his students films by his favorite directors, such as Akira Kurosawa and Andrei Tarkovsky. In 2003, he became a professor of fine art at the University of Derby, and in 2013, he was granted emeritus professor status until the time of his passing.
Goto affectionately referred to his shared terrace house with Celia as the “smallest palace in the world.” Its walls were adorned with artwork by his St Martin’s friends, including Klimowski and Craigie Horsfield. Jazz music perpetually filled the air. As he strolled through the High Street in Oxford, he would often pass by a plaster dog outside a jeweler’s shop, a subject that the Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy had photographed while fleeing Nazi Germany in 1936. This dog, along with other photographs by Moholy-Nagy, served as inspiration for Goto’s exhibition “Two Days at Oxford” in 2016.
In 1967, while studying at St Martin’s, Goto met Linda Gowan, whom he married in 1972 and divorced in 1982. The following year, he encountered Celia Farrelly and married her in 1992. She survives him, as do their daughters Jade and Zoey. John (Glithero) Goto, an exceptional photographer, was born on February 11, 1949, and passed away on August 2, 2023.
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