Judith Golden is especially imaginative and mature in her use of other media in photography.  Golden explores concerns relating to role playing and the concept of illusion and reality in photography.
Louise Katzman, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Photo/trans/forms

In her Chameleon series she created stereotypical personalities for herself, both male and female, with strongly decorative manipulation and color that have become part of her trademark.  Here is a feminist expression that has grown from stereotype to archetype.
Gretchen Garner, Disappearing Witness: Change in Twentieth-Century American Photography

In Golden’s Cycles series, her youthful models appear to have become one with the desert typography, suggesting the cycle of life and death and a communion with nature…
Because all of the artist’s images include the human face, Golden could, strictly speaking, be called a portraitist, but she points out one important difference.  “I’m not trying to convey the individuality of each person – just the opposite”, Golden says.  “I’m trying to show how we all fit into a universal timeless rhythm.
Larry Thall, Chicago Tribune

These carefully considered tableau create a richly other world in which everyday people…become forces, if not deities, emerging from darkness.
Joanna Freuh, Art in America

Golden’s pictures awake something slumbering inside…of whispered legends, of a time when the world seemed less tired and more mysterious.
Robert Cauthorn, Arizona Daily Star

Golden addresses the lost realms of myth and magic.  There’s something about the glowing colors of her work and the emphasis on pre-rational states of being that suggest the Pre-Raphaelite painters of the mid-nineteenth century.  These English artists, appalled by the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution, reached back to the Middle Ages, before the Age of Reason, for inspiration both in technique and in spiritual symbols.  In this high-tech age, Golden similarly longs for earlier myths.
Margaret Regan, Tucson Weekly

Judith Golden’s images are a progressive process of self-exploration involving temporal and eternal time, anima and animus, the conscious and the unconscious self, and a cast of allegorical characters that figure both as subject and medium of artistic expression.  Layered realities form the poetics of psychological presence in the photographic portraits that explore the elemental sense-memory of being.
Jerre Johnston, Etherton Gallery