A Record Of Real Life: Nan Goldin. “I knew from a very early age, that what I saw on TV had nothing to do with real life.
So I wanted to make a record of real life. That included having a camera with me at all times.” – Nan Goldin Do you ever look at someone’s work and think “I just don’t get it. Why is this important? Why is it in a gallery?” Even if you’re not familiar with many photographers by name, you may have heard the name Nan Goldin.
Goldin was born in 1953 in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. When she left the school she enrolled in a photography program at Tufts University in Boston. Her work has always been tinged with the words like “pornographic” or “heroin chic”, but to her it has always been about love, and about our search for intimacy. One of the most important aspects of her work is the honesty with which she shoots. It was after that particularly violent episode with Brian that she hit her all-time low. This discovery did not change her subject matter or her style, however.
Links Recommended Reading. NAN GOLDIN: “(Nan) Goldin’s Years” (2002. Nan one month after being battered, 1984 Goldin’s Years By Lisa Liebmann, originally published in ArtForum, October, 2002 Nan Goldin is more than a good or significant photographer, more than a widely celebrated one.
She has over the past couple of decades become nothing less than a cultural force majeure–a “monstre,” in the sense of sacre, as she was described in Connaissance des arts last fall when her current traveling retrospective opened in Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou. In America, Goldin’s vast and relentlessly personal body of images has often been jokingly referred to as “The Family of Nan,” in part because so many of the pictures convey, and even awaken, feelings, at once empathic and vicarious, of collective intimacy. Not, perhaps, since Edward Steichen spread his globalist’s honey in the mid-’50s has an accumulation of photographs connected with so many viewers on so deep an emotional level.
French Chris on the Convertible, NYC, 1979. E.J. BELLOCQ: “‘Bellocq Epoque’ – Nan Goldin on Photographer E.J. Bellocq” (1997. By Nan Goldin, Originally Published in ArtForum, May, 1997 Late one Berlin night in 1991, a famous German fashion photographer invited me and two friends to join him for a trip to Bel Ami, his favorite brothel in the Grunewald.
The presence of a woman as a customer created a ripple of surprise, but the photographer, being a regular and popular visitor, put them at ease. Glossy prints of his published photographs of the house, group portraits of the “girls” who worked there and the pimp (“host”), were hanging on the walls. Though the setting was a German villa, the props were familiar: patterned wallpaper, heart-shaped velvet pillows, mirrors, chandeliers, gilded Turkish figurines holding red lamps, pink fleshy faux-Baroque nude paintings. One could imagine the same prevalence of gold and red in the brothels of Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans in the early part of the century. Without Friedlander’s intervention, no one would know the work of E.J. (All rights reserved. Nan Goldin e Walk on The Wild Side.