Nan Goldin-- Photography and Love

Nan Goldin Photography

         Nancy Goldin is an American photographer who was born in 1953 in Boston.   Nan was raised in an upper middle class family and was the youngest of four children. She was closest to the eldest, her sister Barbara Holly who was almost 8 years older than her. When Nan was 11 years old, her sister committed suicide and it greatly affected her. In her teenage years, Nan rebelled herself: she got kicked out of school for smoking pot and ran away from home. Nan, who was 15 years old at the time, attended a free-spirited school where she met best friend David Armstrong and first came in contact with photography. It was like she was trying to live the freedom that her sister was not able or allowed to live.

          Through David, she met a community of drag queens and started photographing them. She began taking pictures of the people that surrounded her in every possible situation: at bars, while they were having sex or doing drugs, at the park, etc. The subjects, who were in fact her closest friends, were taken unopposed and in an unplanned setting, making her one of the snapshot aesthetic pioneers. Photography partially acted as Nan’s memory. In the early 80s, Nan became addicted to cocaine and heroin. She also met boyfriend Brian Burchill in 1981 and photographed a known image entitled Nan and Brian in Bed. (See above) The relationship ended when Burchill battered Nan and caused serious injuries that almost caused her death. In 1986, she created the “Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, a slideshow that showed her work with music in the background. These work showed basically what was her life and the world that surrounded her between 1970 and 1986.

          In 1988, she went to a rehab clinic. For her it was a period that she describes as “a period of fear and crisis of identity”. She started to take pictures of herself everyday, and she felt like by doing this she could rediscover how she looked like without drugs. It was at this time that she started to live again on daylight and when she started to realize that light affected the colour film. For many years her interest was manly in photographing people’s behavior, their relationship, sexuality and gender identification. She also took a lot of pictures of couples and the relation between couples was something that amazed her, especially couples that were suddenly being caught in a boring relationship. After she left the clinic, her work became a lot more about the light and we can clearly notice this by looking at her work from the early nineties.

          One year and a half after she left the clinic, she moved back to New York City, where she lived with a woman that had been her lover when she was younger. Nan photographed this woman everyday and she said it was a form of love making and that at this point of her life taking pictures was a way of getting close to someone without taking drugs. Once again we can notice how she involves her life with her work. It is almost like reading a diary of her life. At this time Nan was loosing a lot of her friends (and that means the main subjects of her work) that were dying from AIDS.

          It was also at this time that she began to take pictures of landscapes. It is mostly by her self-portraits and landscapes from today that we can see her evolution as an artist. There are more than 15 books published with her work. She also made two documentaries: “I’ll be Your Mirror”which tells the story of her life. The other one, called “Ballad at the Morgue” talks about a subject that was always part of life: The HIV virus.

          In 2007 Nan Goldin won The Hasselblad Award. The foundation cited her as “the most significant photographer at our time”.

          What really amazes us about Nan Goldin is that once you begin to get to know her work you can’t stop looking and loving it each time more. It is like you really begin to get into her life and even to know her friends, since they were often her subjects. She claims that any famous photographer or artist didn’t influence her. Her biggest influences were and are her friends. She was also one of the few photographers who started taking color pictures and actually this is something that really stands out about her work: strong and bright colors. Her pictures contain also a sophisticated composition, mirror-play and shadow effects.

          It is a wonderful photographer, an amazing artist, and definitely a woman of influence. Someone who clearly makes a difference in the story of photography. 

Nan, one month after being battered

Self-Portrait on Train

• The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin, Aperture, 2005
• Nan Goldin, Paulette Gagnon, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2003
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2002/jan/06/features.magazine27
• Photography and Love, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Hh61liRjac