Biography:
Nan Goldin is
an example of an artist who works at the most intimate level:
her life is her work and her work, her life. It is nearly
impossible to discuss Goldin's photographs without referring to
their subjects by name, as though the people pictured were one's
own family and friends. It is this intimate and raw style for
which Goldin has become internationally renowned. Her
"snapshot"-esque images of her friends -- drag queens, drug
addicts, lovers and family -- are intense, searing portraits
that, together, make a document of Goldin's life. Goldin herself
has commented on her photographic style and philosophy, saying,
"My work originally came from the snapshot aesthetic . . .
Snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places,
and shared times. They're about creating a history by recording
a history."
On September 12, 1953, Goldin was born in Washington, D.C.
Shortly thereafter, she and her family moved to a suburb of
Boston, where Goldin was to spend several primarily unhappy
years before moving away from her family. In 1965, when Nan was
14 years old, her older sister, Barbara Holly Goldin, committed
suicide. Deeply disturbed by this event, Goldin sought comfort
in her friends: in them, she created an alternate family. Having
decided that conventional family life and traditional schooling
were not for her, Goldin moved in with a series of foster
families, and soon enrolled in an alternative school called
Satya Community School. It was at Satya, located in Lincoln,
Massachusetts, that Goldin met two people who would be great
friends and influences for many years to come: David Armstrong
and Suzanne Fletcher. As the memory of her sister started to
become hazy, Goldin began to take pictures to preserve the
present, and thus her fading memories of the past. She
photographed her friends so she would never lose the memory of
them, as had happened with her sister. Her photographs were her
way of documenting their lives, and, in turn, her own.
It was at Satya that Goldin's fascination with photography truly
began to take shape. Goldin, along with her new friends
Armstrong and Fletcher, used photography as a way of reinventing
herself and those around her. Heavily influenced by fashion
photography, Goldin and her companions would dress up for one
another. Trying their hands at cross-dressing and drag were
commonplace; this early experimentation would shape Goldin's
lifelong fascination with the blurry line separating the
genders. Through Armstrong, Goldin was introduced to the drag
subculture in Boston, and thus a nightclub called The Other
Side. There, she photographed drag queen beauty contests during
the early 1970s and became friends with many transvestites.
Goldin sought to depict her subjects in a straightforward,
non-judgmental way: she saw drag as a way to reinvent oneself,
and reinforced this idea by taking photographs of her friends in
full drag regalia, as well as in various stages of preparation.
In photographs such as David at Grove Street, Boston, 1972,
Ivy Wearing a Fall, Boston, 1972, and Kenny Putting on
Make-up, Boston, 1973, Goldin depicts her companions in
various stages of drag. In the first two, the subjects stare
unflinchingly at the viewer, each proud of his transformation,
yet still calling attention to the fine line between masculine
and feminine. In the third, Kenny is shown absorbed in his own
beauty, concentrating intently on creating an alternate version
of himself in the mirror. Through these portraits, along with
the many others taken of her classmates and friends, Goldin
illustrates the confusion and recklessness of the time in which
she was creating her art.
It was during this period that Goldin began her course of study
at the Boston School of Fine Arts. This transition marks a
change in Goldin's photographic style. Prior to college she had
used only black and white film, shooting primarily from
available light sources (with the exception of some of the
photographs made at The Other Side, for which she used flash).
She soon began experimenting with color, which would become an
integral part of her photographic style. The introduction of
flash into her work also greatly contributed to what is known
today as the "Goldin look." Rarely working from natural light,
Goldin illuminates her subjects with careful use of flash that
extenuates her vibrant colors. She achieves bright, deep hues by
printing her 35 mm film with a photographic process called
Cibachrome. While normal, c-type prints are made from printing
from color negatives, Cibachrome prints are photographs printed
from slides. This process allows the photographer to achieve
optimum colors and contributes greatly to the sharp, bright
quality of color in Goldin's prints.
Goldin's 1978 move to the Bowery in New York City marked a major
life change, both in her career and her personal life. Goldin's
photographs of this period reflect her hard-living lifestyle:
excessive use of drugs and alcohol and abusive relationships
were commonplace in Goldin's circle of friends. Goldin wrote, "I
believe one should create from what one knows and speak about
one's tribe . . .You can only speak with true understanding and
empathy about what you've experienced." True to her credo,
Goldin documented everything: drunken parties, relationships
good and bad, evidence of beatings, all of which created an
intense portrait of a close-knit group of friends. In the early
1980s, these photographs would be shown in the form of slides
during Goldin's now-infamous slide shows.
A melange of photographs and music, these shows were originally
held at punk rock clubs in New York City in order for Goldin's
friends (and photographic subjects) to see the photographs that
she had taken of them. Tin Pan Alley was one of the most
frequent spots for these events, a locale that conveniently
provided a working place for such up-and-coming artists as Kiki
Smith, Cookie Mueller and Barbara Ess. At the time, the show
(later called The Ballad of Sexual Dependency), which was
made up of color photographs lit with flash, ran approximately
45 minutes. As Goldin evolved as an artist, the show also
changed, and more photographs were added and songs were changed.
Despite changes to the content of the show, the basic atmosphere
of intimacy remained, and Goldin's visceral style communicated
raw emotion. It was in 1986 that Goldin began to take her show
on the road, traveling abroad to exhibit her work. Ballad
saw screen time at both the Edinburgh and Berlin Film Festivals.
By 1988, Goldin's drug and alcohol abuse had begun to take a
toll on her life and work, and she entered a detoxification
clinic. Though she had previously experimented with
self-portraiture, it was in this clinic that she created many
images of herself. Photographs such as My Bedroom at the
Lodge, Self-portrait in front of clinic, and
Self-portrait with milagro reveal an introspective Goldin,
somewhat humbled by her experiences at the hospital. In
Self-portrait with milagro, the viewer sees Goldin in her
room at the clinic, sitting up on her bed. She leans toward the
camera, taking up most of the frame; the remaining portion of
the frame is taken up by her institutional bed pillows and a
small crucifix hanging on the wall. Goldin's proximity to the
camera has caused her face to be slightly blurred compared with
her sharply defined hand, which is resting on the pillows. This
slight blurring, combined with the cramped composition of the
photograph, communicates Goldin's feeling of being trapped
within the hospital. The colors in the photograph are neutral
except for Goldin's mouth: situated in the center of the
photograph, it is covered in bright red lipstick. This flash of
color in the institutional setting catches the eye, then leads
it down the pyramid-like positioning of Goldin's body to her
ringed hand, tense on her pillow. Self-portrait with milagro
is a fine example of the simple way in which Goldin uses
seemingly haphazard composition to carefully build the feeling
(in this case, her claustrophobia in the hospital) that she is
trying to communicate.
During this time, Goldin faced an additional personal struggle:
many of her close friends were dying of AIDS, which was then a
relatively new disease. Perhaps most important of these was
Cookie Mueller, a friend since 1976, the year in which Goldin
started photographing her. Goldin's series, entitled The
Cookie Portfolio, is comprised of 15 portraits of Cookie,
ranging from those taken at the parties of their youth to those
from Cookie's funeral in 1989. During the next few years, Goldin
continued to photograph her slowly dwindling circle of friends,
many of whom were afflicted with AIDS. She showed these
photographs in many group exhibitions across the country and
around the world and spent a year in Berlin on a DAAD grant,
sponsored by a German organization that brings artists to
Berlin.
In 1994, she and her longtime best friend David Armstrong
collaborated on a book called A Double Life. Composed of
photographs taken by both Goldin and Armstrong, the book
displays their differing styles of photographing the same
person. Also included are some of their portraits of one
another. A 1995 show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in
Boston grouped Goldin, Armstrong and fellow photographers and
friends Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson and
several others, and dubbed them the "Boston School." This name
stuck, and the photographers have since been referred to by this
title.
The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of
Goldin's work in 1996; it was called I'll Be Your Mirror.
Composed of photographs from every period of her career, the
exhibit also boasted a showing of a version of The Ballad of
Sexual Dependency. Goldin continues to photograph and
recently had her first solo show in London, at the popular White
Cube Gallery. Her work continues to evolve with her life. Of
this she writes, "My work changes as I change. I feel an
artist's work has to change, otherwise you become a replication
of yourself." With Goldin's close, immediate style and
stunningly beautiful images, there is no threat of her becoming
a replication.
SOURCE: brain-juice.com
|