Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror

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When we think of Goldin’s love and understanding of queer subculture, she presents the articulation of drag as a form of authentic self-expression. Jimmy Paulette is not quite dressed yet, but he is in a state of becoming. He is not vulnerable. He is relaxed and confident. In “Visual Diary”, Nan further explored the inequality and instability of the relationship between men and women by showing the relationship and the change of distance between her and her boyfriend Brian. As Nan’s boyfriend and model, Brian beat, insulted Nan and even almost wiped out her eyes. “Visual Diary” is like a silent film that stimulates people’s nerves and records Brian’s abuse of Nan. The picture named “Nan, who was beaten after a month” is the “work” of Brian. In “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, Nan also preserved her many years of memories: the death of family and friends, the breakdown of relationship, the gathering of friends, and Naomi wearing a gorgeous dance dress with laughing. . Through these photos, Nan not only reveals the fragile and sensitive side of human nature, but also expresses the relationship between desire and loss, joy and sorrow, sex and lovelorn, which seemingly contradictory but symbiotic coexists. She first wants to prove is the universal theme of human destruction: the inevitable collapse of love relationships, the indulgence of desires, the loss of loved ones and friends, and the illusion of escape from reality. s Self Portrait Writing my Diary, Boston MA (1989) foregrounds the connection between verbal and visual self-writing; how does the much-vaunted kinship between verbal diary and visual diary work in the case of Goldin and to what extent is the analogy between verbal and visual autobiography pertinent in her case? To answer those questions, I will examine what the term self-portraiture means with respect to Goldin’s work, and then analyze the way the construction of her work is akin to verbal autobiography. To conclude, I will bring out Goldin’s aim in creating works like The Ballad of Sexual Dependency which I propose to consider as an extended self-portrait. I. Mon semblable, ma sœur Few photographers can boast a body of work as deep and uncompromisingly honest as that of Nan Goldin. Internationally renowned for her documentation of love, fluid sexuality, glamour, beauty, death, intoxication and pain, Goldin’s photographs feature her life and those in it. Her visual language and “social portraiture” approach not only rejects the conventional limits of the medium of photography, it creates something unique: a mirror of herself, as well as the world.

In her snapshots of people at parties, in bars, lounging around, having sex, on the beach, and riding trains in New York, Provincetown, and Berlin, Goldin pinpointed and captured the joy and the pain of those who populated her life, many of whom were queer, drug users, or otherwise nonconforming to “traditional” norms. (Goldin herself was a sex worker during this time, she revealed recently.) The same people appear again and again—Armstrong, Greer Lankton, Cookie Mueller, Suzanne Fletcher, Sharon Niesp, and someone identified only as Brian, a longtime boyfriend of Goldin’s.Goldin had her first solo show in 1973 at Project, Inc. in Boston. The following year she and Armstrong enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (as did Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe, who would go on to successful careers of their own); after graduating she moved with a group of friends first to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then to New York. Goldin had found her “extended family.” With her sister still at the forefront of her mind, she “became obsessed with never losing the memory of anyone again,” she said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. It was this that drove her to constantly photograph members of what she called her tribe. left: Nan Goldin, “Jimmy Paulette and Tabboo in the Bathroom, NYC, 1991” right: Diane Arbus, “A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966” In 2022, Goldin was awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize for her contributions to contemporary photography. A retrospective exhibition, “This Will Not End Well,” is touring European museums for the next couple of years, with an accompanying book coming in 2023. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the new documentary directed by Laura Poitras, covers Goldin’s life and work, with a focus on her P.A.I.N. activism. It won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival. In the text for her book, Goldin described The Ballad as a “visual diary” to share with the world. But whereas Robert Frank’s concerns were largely documentary, she was adamant that her pictures “come out of relationships, not observation,” and she included many self-portraits. (A more apt comparison may be to Larry Clark, whose autobiographical 1971 photo book, Tulsa, Goldin has cited as an inspiration.) Goldin wrote in The Ballad, “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.”

Perhaps it is this deep-rooted cinephilia that critics sense when they describe Goldin’s photographs as “cinematic.” Goldin has dedicated her career to documenting her life, as well as the lives of her friends and chosen family. Her “subjects,” many of whom are as charismatic, stylish, and memorable as movie stars, become characters, their unfolding lives transformed into storylines which unfurl across hundreds of diaristic, richly detailed photographs. In series such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-6), Goldin follows her characters across the years, constructing in the process a sweeping portrait of a time, place, and community, from the explosive creativity of New York’s queer art scene to the devastation of the AIDS crisis. Goldin’s key themes—sex, relationships, addiction, death—are grand and, yes, cinematic; the stuff of real life and, therefore, also the stuff of movies. Reconstructing early-modern religious lives: the exemplary and the mundane / 2. Another Vision of Empire. Henry Rider Haggard’s Modernity and Legacy In 1985 The Ballad slideshow was selected for inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. The following year, Goldin worked with curator Marvin Heiferman (who’d helped produce her slideshows for public viewing) to edit and compress The Ballad into a 127-image Aperture photo book of the same name. In a review in the New York Times, art critic Andy Grundberg wrote, “What Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ was to the 1950s, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is to the 1980s. . . . Goldin, at the age of 33, has created an artistic masterwork that tells us not only about the attitudes of her generation, but also about the times in which we live.” At 14, afraid she would suffer the same fate as her sister, Goldin ran away from home. She discovered photography while living in foster homes in the Boston area. At school she met David Armstrong, the first person she photographed and the one who started calling her Nan. They moved together into a row house in Boston with four other roommates, and as Armstrong started performing in drag, Goldin became enamored of the drag queens and their lives, seeing them as a “third gender that made more se

Perhaps her sister’s suicide had a huge impact on Nan, when her memories of her sister gradually became blurred, she began to fear losing her loved ones and things. Therefore, Nan decided to use the camera to record the people around her and everything that happened. “Maybe I won’t lose anything in this way”, Nan thought. Que fait l'image ? De l'intericonicité aux États-Unis » / 2. « Character migration in Anglophone Literature » The work is called “Nan, who was beaten after a month”. I was surprised when I saw this photo for the first time. Although Goldin in the photo reveals awkwardness and the bruises on her face are clearly visible, her eyes are firm, calm, but helpless. This is completely different from the self-portraits I have seen before. Delvaux, Martine et Jamie Herd. “Comment faire apparaître Écho ? Sœurs, saintes et sibylles de Nan Goldin et Autoportrait en vert de Marie Ndiaye.” Protée, volume 35, number 1, printemps 2007, 29–39. https://doi.org/10.7202/015886ar Web. 3 May. 2023. In the photo, her transvestite friends, determined, calm, and unduly to show their beautiful posture, this is the Nan’s early photography, which reflects the characteristics of the traditional documentary photography at that time: the photographer and the model are two individuals. They are only indifferent in their own space, with relationship but does not intimate. Moreover, the photographer records the life and state of the model, but can’t describe the essence behind the photo.

In 2000 Goldin went into rehab at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, taking photos of the skyline outside her window in the series “57 Days in Roosevelt Hospital.” These pictures would become a part of her 2003 book “The Devil’s Playground.” She vowed never to return to Brian’s side. Later Nan included this photo in “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, this had a big impact at the time. A female photographer calmly faces the camera and records how she has been beaten– what she wants to express is not just introspection, fragility and pain, but the harm caused by the imbalance or even opposition between the two sexes. Relating / L'Écosse en relation / 2. Religion & civil society in Britain and the English-speaking world – What’s the English for “ laïcité”? manner in which the presentation of works in museums is constructed rhythmically can be seen in the room devoted to Goldin in 2020 in Avignon (third and fourth slides) or in the hanging at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2014 (MoCA). Goldin’s founding work The Ballad is indeed a show, a work whose parameters are those of time as much as that of the space of the visual object. Moreover, when presenting a sequence of photographs in slide shows, the artist further transforms the still images into temporal works through the use of music. The songs not only tell stories akin to those in the pictures (the Brechtian story of alcohol, the Kitt story of solitude, or the Lou Reed and Nico story of partying and of fatal attraction), they also make the viewer sensuously aware of experiencing the images in time. What most structures the work therefore is its syntax, the assembly of one image with another. Tellingly, Goldin insists that The Ballad is not just a show or a wall display, but also a book, a sequential form she feels suited to photography—“It’s the only (visual) art that really works in books,” she says (MoCA). So when she was fourteen, she chose to escape from the home, where was rigid, stubborn, false and serious, to formed a new “Utopia family” with a group of young people who lived on the edge of society and loved the hippie culture. Most of these young people are artists and writers who despised traditional bourgeois life, indulged in alcohol, drugs and sex. They never live for others.Lejeune, Philippe, Catherine Bogaert. Le journal intime : histoire et anthologie. Paris : Textuel, 2006. MoCA TV, “Nan Goldin on The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” Video directed by Emma Reeves. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cYWw0P7dxI Web. 3 May. 2023. Sartorius, Joachim. “Deep Pictures of Us All”. I’ll Be Your Mirror. New York : Whitney Museum of Art, 1996.