Private: The Photographs of William Goldman: Gallery Two • In-Person and Online

Behind closed doors in 1890s Pennsylvania, William I. “Billy” Goldman—respected Reading photographer, society man, and self-styled artist—trained his lens on a world no one was meant to see. The resulting images, long hidden and only recently rediscovered, offer a rare and intimate glimpse into the lives of women who lived on the margins of respectability, yet radiate dignity, sensuality, and agency.

This exhibition brings together a selection from Goldman’s private archive—photographs he never intended for public view, made in collaboration with the women employed at Sallie Shearer’s brothel. These are not mere “French postcards” or lewd curiosities. Rather, they are sensitive, sometimes playful, and always complex studies of women navigating the conditions of their time with poise and wit. We see them undressing, lounging, reading newspapers, playing music, even examining albums of themselves—occupying the dual roles of subject and spectator, muse and maker.

Goldman’s images are a study in paradox. His public persona was one of propriety and civic standing; his private artistry, however, pursued a tender, if clandestine, documentation of bodies, lives, and fleeting moments. The photographs blend boudoir artifice with the rawness of real life. The women, often dressed in elaborate undergarments that served as both armor and ornament, appear not as objects but as individuals—some bold, some withdrawn, many surprisingly relaxed given the taboos of the era.

At the heart of this body of work is an undeniable human tension: between concealment and revelation, between morality and survival, between art and transaction. These were women with few options in an industrializing world that offered them scant protection and even fewer choices. And yet, in these photographs, they are not cast as victims but as collaborators in the creation of imagery that, even today, resists easy categorization.

This exhibition follows Working Girls: An American Brothel, Circa 1892. The Secret Photographs of William Goldman, presented at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in September 2018 and coinciding with the publication of the eponymous book by G Editions (formerly Glitterati). That landmark exhibition introduced this extraordinary body of work to the public for the first time. This new iteration offers a fresh look, inviting viewers to reflect on the quiet radicalism of these images and the histories they recover.

More than a century later, these photographs resonate with power. They remind us that behind every image is a story—often unfinished, often untold. This exhibition seeks not only to illuminate the artistry of William Goldman, but to honor the lives and labor of the women who stood before his lens: unknown to us, but not unknowable.