Bio:
For nearly twenty years, New Orleans-based fine art music photographer Erika Molleck Goldring has developed her own unique style of performance portraiture. Her character-driven portfolio features such celebrated acts as Beyonce, Keith Richards, Willie Nelson, and Fats Domino, as well as breaking new acts in genres as divergent as hip-hop, jazz, blues, bluegrass, americana, country, pop and rock.
Erika captures the energy in a live show—whether it’s the split second a beautiful stage light falls on her subject or the raw emotion emanating from the performer lost in the groove. Simplicity and balance prevail in Erika’s images. Her work speaks of the sounds, vibrations and rhythmic idiosyncrasies distinct to each performer.
Her work is regularly featured in a number of publications and newspapers, including Rolling Stone, People, Entertainment Weekly, Time, Billboard and DownBeat magazines, as well as the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today and The Guardian newspapers. Erika has had works accepted into the Smithsonian’s Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland, OH.
She is continually hired by Getty Images Entertainment, performing rights organization BMI, Ryman Auditorium and Ryman Hospitality Properties, Sony Nashville, Americana Music Association, Pilgrimage Festival, Key West Songwriters Festival and Trombone Shorty Foundation.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
“Erika has an ability to non-intrusively move into the mix of New Orleans’ cultural bearers, from Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs to Mardi Gras Indians, capturing intimate moments without disturbing the tradition itself.”
Michelle Longino, Founder & Inter-Club Relations Director,
New Orleans Bayou Steppers Social Aid & Pleasure Club
“Erika Goldring has the valuable and rare ability as a photographer to shoot images that are as dynamic as the culture and musicians she portrays and yet exhibit a mystery and intimacy with her subjects, giving them a depth that is not often seen.”
David Kunian, New Orleans correspondent, DownBeat Magazine
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).