Nan Goldin’s colour portraits of her bohemian community in the 1970s turned the intimate family snapshot into an artistic genre and valid photographic art. Reappropriating the family medium of the slide show and photo album, Goldin creates a visual diary of the private lives of her chosen ”family” of gays, lesbians, transgender people and others outside mainstream society, whom she has photographed consistently over 40 years.
Her work with familiar characters, affectionately known as ‘the family of Nan’, and its emotional intensity are reminiscent of cinematic narratives, large, powerful and intense, a claim she herself makes. Unlike cinema, Goldin insists on the truthful, unposed nature of her work, aligning herself with photography’s fidelity to realism and openly introducing her authorial relationship to the subject through titles that give the name of her subject and the place where the photograph was taken. Goldin has encouraged this reading of her work as autobiographical, famously describing The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as ‘the diary I let people read’. Challenging the notion that gender is biological, she reveals the constructed nature of gender roles, tracing what she calls ”the third gender.”
Born into a wealthy Boston family, Goldin began taking photographs at the age of 15 after her older sister committed suicide, which Goldin says helped her cope with the tragedy. Goldin left home at an early age and lived with various foster families as a teenager.
She went to art school, intending to do fashion photography, and studied at the New England School of Photography with Henry Horenstein, who influenced her snapshot aesthetic. She later attended the Boston School of Fine Arts, where her roommates, the subjects of her first exhibition in 1975, were two drag queens whom she photographed at home and in gay bars. In 1978, she moved to New York City, where she became involved in the thriving art scene that was emerging around the East Village.
Goldin’s work has been associated with the unposed photographs of Larry Clark and the banal ‘outtakes’ of contemporary artist Jack Pierson. Goldin has also been associated with Cindy Sherman, who similarly documents the constructed nature of gendered identity, glamour and self-presentation.
Goldin acknowledges debts to Nobuyoshi Araki, painters Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko – in her use of voids and visual clarity -, and the sensual portraits of 16th-century painter Caravaggio. Within the history of photography, she has been associated with the portraiture of August Sander and Diane Arbus, but unlike these two photographers, Goldin is part of the group she documents, using her images as a form of emotional connection rather than distance.
This claim to ‘insider documentary’ also allows her to reject criticisms of voyeurism and exoticism.
As Goldin has said, ”I’m not crashing. This is my party. This is my family, my friends.” She also takes self-portraits, further blurring her role as photographer vis-à-vis her subjects.
Goldin’s work was initially presented as evolving slide shows for downtown audiences composed of those who participated in the fringe culture lifestyles she was documenting. Her Ballad of Sexual Dependency series, made between 1978 and 1996, was her first major slide show, comprising over 700 images set to an eclectic soundtrack. It was later published as a book. By photographing her community of friends, those who became familiar with her work were able to follow her subject, even allowing the viewer to follow the breakdown of relationships, death from AIDS or addiction, and recovery from addiction, as in the five-part series Gilles and Gotscho, 1992-1993. Goldin was also unflinching in her portrayal of herself, as her own drug and alcohol abuse landed her in hospital at the end of 1988.
Goldin’s break with the supposedly neutral gaze of the photographer is evident in her book The Other Side. This series documents the intimate relationships and communities of transsexuals, depicting them in nightclubs and at events such as Wigstock and other gay pride celebrations. Like the Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin presented these photographs as slide shows at weekly dinner parties.
Goldin challenged the traditional values of art and portrait photography with her 1996 retrospective I’ll Be Your Mirror at the Whitney Museum, New York. One of the few female photographers to have had a solo exhibition at the Whitney, it marked a turning point in Goldin’s career and her entry into the mainstream contemporary art world. The photographs in this exhibition show her preferred settings: interiors where private dramas are played out, especially cluttered kitchens and bathrooms, rumpled beds, downtown bars and nightclubs, and other gathering places. These photographs are always acutely attuned to the complex negotiations between people and their surroundings.
One of Goldin’s strengths is her use of colour as a catalyst for amplifying the motional tenor of the moment. In one of her best-known images, Nan and Brian in Bed, NYC 1983, the scene is lit with an orange glow that captures the mood of a painful and dying relationship, as Goldin captures herself lying behind her lover on the bed, distant and alone. Nan One Month after Being Battered, NYC 1984 is a startling portrait of painful self-confrontation, her lipstick brightly reflecting the blood from her injured eye. Nan’s images are acutely aware of the politics of the gaze and the power dynamics of the seer and the seen. By immersing the viewer in the lives of people not usually seen on the big screen, Nan humanises them, telling their story and her own with vivid clarity and careful compassion.
In All By Myself-Beautiful at Forty, 1953-1995, Goldin extends the theme of autobiography as a narrative form. A moving sequence of 83 self-portraits set to singer Eartha Kitt’s ”Devil’s Playground”, the series suggests a confrontation with maturity and aging and includes more exterior shots than in her earlier series, including cityscapes and deserted landscapes.
Her photographs are snapshot-like but technically sophisticated in composition, using strong depth of field, stage-managed mirrors and glowing lights. Consistent throughout her oeuvre is the power of framing to express emotion, as she uses colour to give meaning to the shabbiest apartment, a mirrored nightclub, or landscapes infused with trauma, such as ”Red Sky Outside my Window, NYC, 2000” from her series Elements.
Goldin uses photography as a means of recording an individual’s psychological state, emphasising the medium’s ability to express more than the objective ”truth”.
Focusing on Europe, she continued her exploration of relationships in Heart Beat, 2000-2001, a series of 228 slides following five couples in domestic scenes. In this series, the artist is more peripheral to the relationships and desires she depicts than in her earlier work, where the boundaries between artist and subject were blurred.
