Nan Goldin's Photography: Life Laid Bare
Horny Hefty
Part 1: Private & Public
In the writing about photographers, it is always difficult to decide
how much to include about their personal life. There are some of
course we know little or nothing about apart from what their images
tell us. E J Bellocq's pictures taken in the brothels of Storyville
(see 'Nude photography, 1840-1920' in box at right) were only
discovered long after he was forgotten and we can only guess at his
motives and pick over a few poorly remembered details gleaned from the
elderly who thought they still remembered him. Many other
photographers have deliberately kept a high wall between their art and
their private lives. It was, for example hard to find it even a year
of birth for one or two of those included in this site's 'Directory of
Notable Photographers'
Even for those who have lived and worked more publicly it is sometimes
difficult to draw a suitable line. Edward Weston for many years wrote
his thoughts in his day-books, and although he cut out some names and
passages with a razor blade before handing them to Nancy Newhall for
editing and publication, they perhaps still tell us more than we need
to know about his personal life, fascinating though it may be at
times. What he thought about his work is really of more interest.
Weston's relationships with women - Magarethe Mather, Tina Modotti and
Charis Wilson Weston among others - had an important impact on his
work, which I tried to bring out in my features on him without going
into the minutiae of his many relationships. It is just these aspects
of his life that seemed to titillate his major biographer and others,
and the concentration on these rather than on his work distorts
appreciation. Landscapes are already generally less sexy than the nude
without the added spice of personality journalism.
With Nan Goldin it is different; her introduction to her first book,
published in 1986, begins "The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency is the
diary I let people read." Goldin wanted the camera to become part of
her and to "obsessively record every detail" of her life.
Of course the camera can't do that. It can only offer us glimpses,
framed and caught with more or less skill by the person who directs it
- and Goldin's control as a director is remarkable. The glimpses
depend on both the technology -- lenses, angles of view, depth of
field, the film etc -- and the plans and decisions of the
photographer. These together produce a view of what was there in front
of the camera. Photographs are not simply 'traces' or some kind of
objective replica, but objects that are produced from a particular
viewpoint - moral, ethical and judgmental as much as spatial.
Of course the taking of a photograph is only one stage of a process.
Goldin uses her pictures to tell a story, and in doing so creates her
version of the story. The cover picture of 'The Ballad Of Sexual
Dependency' (a cropped version of one of the slides from the sequence)
shows two people on a bed. Brian sits closer to camera, turned away
from it, looking out of the picture to the left. Naked on the edge of
the double bed, he is smoking a cigarette, looking away and apparently
deep in thought. The side of his face is strongly lit by a flash at
roughly the same level but further to the left side. The flash also
lights the brass bed head, casting its shadow on the bare wall a few
inches away, and lighting Nan's face as she lies awkwardly, head on
pillow watching him. Her upper torso is covered by a black robe from
which only her left hand is visible, flat on the sheet, wearing a
watch and a gold wedding ring. The picture is also bathed in gold
light, turning everything - Brian's flesh, the wall to shades of
yellow or orange or brown, a colour that perhaps suggests sunset. The
couple are together on the bed but clearly separate, at different ends
of it, he sitting upright, she horizontal.
It is such a carefully crafted tableaux - and in the un-cropped
original inside the book, even more clearly so. Looking at this we see
how the position of the light draws our attention to the faces of the
two people, lighting them and the pillow on which Nan's head is
uncomfortably resting, while casting a shadow behind her and on the
lower part of the bed. We also see, staring out at us from the wall a
repeat image of Brian, a photograph again with a cigarette, this time
dangling from his lip as he gazes intently at camera. The gaze at the
camera (and the photographer) in that photograph suggests a quite
different relationship from the one we see being acted out in front of
us. As in almost all of Goldin's work, this picture combines a
remarkable detachment in the creation of the work with a total
involvement in the scene she is taking part in. Goldin is always very
much a part of her pictures, whether she appears in frame or not.
Unlike Diane Arbus, who photographed at times in a similar subculture
very much as a tourist or an empathetic collector of unusual species,
Goldin did not stand outside and look in; if anyone is a voyeur it is
us and not her.
For Goldin, the private - or at least a carefully arranged part of it
- has become public. This is a picture of a relationship that she had
been in for some years and was apparently on the point of breaking up,
but it is also a reminder that if you wanted to live in Goldin's life
you also had to play her games for the camera.
The book 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency', (1986) (Ballad), was
dedicated "to the real memory of my sister, Barbara Holly Goldin." Nan
Goldin was the youngest of four children in a very middle class
family; born in Washington DC, her family soon moved to Maryland.
Goldin at eleven was very close to her eighteen-year-old sister and
knew about some of the problems she had in reconciling her sexuality
with the attitudes of society, problems that led her to lie down on a
railway track in front of a train. A few days after the shock of the
suicide, and while she was still desperately mourning the loss of her
sister, Goldin was seduced by an older man. Within that week she
experienced both great loss and pain and was also "awakened to intense
sexual excitement."(Ballad) These two dramatic events shaped the
future of her life and her art.
I find it difficult to imagine the position she was in, with these
immense emotional pressures coming at an age when I was still in short
trousers and being taught that sex was a Latin numeric prefix. Life
was not without its traumas, but mine were less dramatic. Goldin was
confronted in those sudden and tragic events with forces that most of
us become aware of slowly over a period and evolve mechanisms to deal
with or repress, and it is hardly surprising that the issues behind
them have dominated her work. I don't share her lifestyle or some of
her attitudes, but I admire the honesty and clarity of her approach.
Fearing that she might too literally follow in her sister's footsteps,
Goldin ran away from home and its repressive attitudes at the age of
fourteen to be able to live in her own way. She drifted through a
series of foster homes, eventually ending up in a flat share with half
a dozen other disaffected teenagers. These friends became a new family
to her, and among them were two people who were to become her greatest
friends, David Armstrong and Suzanne Fletcher. It was here in the
summer of 1972 she first took up photography, although she had already
started shooting movies. Her first photographs - and her cine footage
- were pictures of herself and her friends dressed up and heavily made
up, striking dramatic poses as the movie stars of their dreams. David
was her favourite model - he was just discovering drag - and he also
became a photographer.
Goldin relates her photography to the death of her sister. She feels
the obsession with recording her friends comes from a realisation that
although she remembered the things Barbara has said to her, she had
lost "the tangible sense of who she was, what her eyes looked like"
(Ballad) and she was determined not to let that happen again. Later
when many of her friends were suffering from Aids, she had a feeling
she could keep them alive if she photographed them enough. Of course
what she could and has kept alive is a memory of them, but photography
has perhaps kept her alive also.
She describes in one of her later books, 'The Other Side' (1993) how
she first saw some drag queens on the street in Boston in 1972, and
immediately followed them and took some Super 8 footage. A few months
later, at the age of 18, following an introduction to them by David
Armstrong at 'The Other Side', a drag club in Boston, she had moved in
with a pair of them and was busy photographing them and their friends.
At this time, Goldin decided she wanted to become a fashion
photographer who would become famous for using queens as models on the
cover of 'Vogue', and she enrolled in a photography evening class. She
had her first show in a basement in Cambridge, Mass the following
year, and all her models attended the opening in drag. These black and
white images formed the basis of her series 'The Boston Years.'
In 1974 she moved out and went full time to study at the "School of
the Museum of Fine Arts" in Boston Although she has described the
pictures she took there as the worse she had ever done, it was while
at art school that Goldin began to develop the look for which she
became noted, switching from black and white to colour film, and also
moving from natural light to an almost exclusive use of flash. Goldin
worked until 1990 with a 35mm single lens reflex camera shooting on
transparency film and having this printed using the direct positive
'Cibachrome' process (now marketed as 'Ilfochrome Classic', but still
generally called by its older name.)
The Cibachrome process tends to exaggerate colour, producing highly
saturated results which maximizes the apparent sharpness of
transparency film. The kind of glow - often yellow or orange - that
she gets in some of the pictures comes easily and naturally from this
process. Since 1990 she has worked with Leica M6 rangefinder cameras.
Some of her more recent work seems to show a more natural lighting
effect, possibly through the use of more sophisticated flash equipment
with larger reflectors.
Much has been talked of the 'Boston School' of photographers,
including Goldin and David Armstrong along with Mark Morrisroe
(1959-89), Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and Jack Pierson (although Goldin
didn't meet Pierson until 1985 in New York.) They were all of a
similar age, moved to New York around 1980, had similar tastes in
music and drugs and often photographed each other as well as mutual
friends.
After her art course, Goldin found it difficult to relate to many of
her old friends - particularly the queens - in Boston in the same way.
She continued to photograph her life and the people in it, without
really finding much she could really work with, taking pictures in
Boston and travelling around. Goldin moved to New York in 1978 (some
of her close friends also made the same move around the same time) and
soon after began photographing in the bars and clubs there. In 1978
and 1979 she lived in England for a while, photographing punks and
mods. These pictures from London have a different feel; the clubs and
music were different, harder, more masculine, more working class, with
little trace of the artsy chic and posing of New York.
She gave her first public slide show around 1980 at the Mudd Club, as
a part of a celebration of Frank Zappa's birthday, and already it and
the audience featured many of those whose lives were to be exposed in
her later work, including David and Suzanne from her early years, and
various New York East Side celebrities such as the transsexual artist
Greer Lankton and poet Cookie Mueller.
Soon the slide show was expanded and given a musical sound track; it
continued to evolve over 15 years, soon being given the title 'The
Ballad of Sexual Dependency', It now contains around 700 slides and
runs for around 50 minutes. The images deal with her ideas about
relationships between people - couples of various types - and the
different ways in which both men and women construct their gender
roles. The pictures in the book, published in 1986, date from 1973 - a
rather conventional looking group of young people eating cake on the
grass of the Esplanade in Boston - to the wedding of her friends
Cookie and Vittorio in 1986, but the current slide show includes some
pictures up to 1989.
Goldin had realised at an early age that she could form strong
relationships both emotionally and sexually with men and women, and
she and her friends were strongly aware of their gender and in various
ways attempted to redefine it. Basic to our relationships she saw the
need to be loved and the need for our own personal space. The idea of
"the struggle between autonomy and dependency" was central to her work
in the 'Ballad', and it was a theme that has almost universal appeal.
Even many of the more conventional and repressed of us at times feel
the constrictions of our position. Like her we need to be together but
we want to be alone.
The 'Ballad' is divided into a number of sections, marked both by
changes in imagery and changes in the accompanying soundtrack. It
doesn't really have a story, more a serious of episodes or themes,
announced by the accompanying music. It's both a celebration and at
times an examination of a subculture full of mainly young people in
80s cool playing with drugs, gender, sex and each other. Those who
were there felt that Goldin had captured the essence of the times in
that particular milieu. Watching the slides I often felt astonished
that someone in more or less the same state as those in the pictures
(and even when she was in the pictures) had managed to function to
make the work, let alone make it so precisely.
Some fifteen years on, I still find it both powerful moving and at
times hysterically funny, though few others in the rapt audience with
which I shared it recently - most of a more similar age to the people
in the pictures - seemed to share my amusement. I don't think it was
ever meant to be taken as the ever so serious great art that it is in
danger of becoming in an art gallery context. Goldin made it as
entertainment as well as art.
There are a few funny bizarre pictures, but it is mainly the oh so
obvious juxtapositions of the soundtrack of excerpts from blues, pop,
rock, reggae and opera that make it hard not to laugh. Name an old,
sad love song and it's probably there, together with some more upbeat
numbers such as the exultantly angry "Wild Women Don't Have the
Blues." It ranges though Brecht and Dean Martin, Callas, Aznavour,
James Brown and Marlene Dietrich to some deservedly unknown names from
the 80s. Technically it seemed amateur at times, with slow slide
changes and annoying seconds of blank screen, while some of the slow
fade effects seem without rationale, reminiscent indeed of many low
budget 'audiovisual' productions of the 1980s - which is exactly where
it started. (See footnote below.)
From a diversion between sets in punk clubs it became a cult and is
now finally a museum piece. We first saw it in the UK at the Edinburgh
festival, then a couple of years later at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. The 'Ballad' is very much a work of
its times, in its clothes, the artefacts and also perhaps the ideas,
though some of these remain the stuff of best sellers. "I often feel",
wrote Goldin "that men and women are irrevocably strangers to each
other … almost as if they were from different planets", a sentiment
that sums up several more recent popular psychology books. You can
learn more from her pictures.
One of the relationships that runs through the 'Ballad' is her own
long term one with Brian (the man sitting on the bed in the picture
described in the previous section.) It was a relationship that was to
end shortly after the picture was taken, possibly in part because
Brian had read some of her diaries, with Goldin battered and nearly
blinded in Berlin in 1984. One of the most moving pictures in the
sequence is a close head and shoulders portrait of her taken at her
request by Suzanne Fletcher a month after the attack. It shows her
facial bruises and a bloodshot part-closed left eye matching her
bright red lipstick as she stares straight at the camera.
Goldin's work impresses by her ability to direct her subjects, to
relive her and their lives for the camera as they live it. Some of the
pictures are certainly snapshots, but most just look like snapshots,
and demonstrate her ability to pick a suitable location and set up a
shot. She is truly a master (one can't say a mistress without
unfortunate connotations) of misé en scene. Even those aspects which
perhaps appear amateur - such as those frames damaged by fogging or
with strong colour casts are used deliberately to enhance the idea
that these are part of a family album. I suspect the couple of
reversed slides in the last performance I saw were a genuine error
rather than design, but they, the noise of the slide changes and the
at times annoyingly overlong blacked screen between slides (and some
rather inept cross fades) all added to the impression of a private and
amateur event in someone's front room. Goldin's family slides are
interesting to watch (we are all voyeurs at heart) but I'm glad to be
only a visitor and to sit these events out in real life.
FOOTNOTE
The reason for this apparent technical backwardness - despite the
modern multi-projection setup - became obvious when I viewed it again
a couple of weeks later, and found it to be rather slicker - no blank
screens and awkward gaps - and to contain more pictures. Quite simply
at least one of the projectors had not been working the first time.
However, it still was not fully working, with some images being
projected so dimly that they were hard to see. It still looked amateur
and inept in terms of presentation, particularly in comparision to the
newer slide shows.
The dupes in use in the show also seemed to be very variable in
quality - some downright poor, and I suspect that some have
deteriorated through continual use, possibly even over the period of
the show. Given the care that has obviously been taken over the
production and presentation of the prints the state of the 'Ballad'
slide show is surprising. Of course a project containing images shot
over a period of more than 20 years, there are going to be
considerable differences due to changes in film emulsions, as well as
the effects of ageing.
The slide shows, and in particular the 'Ballad', rather than the
pictures on the wall, appear to me as the central part of Goldin's
work. I get the impression from the current show that to the galleries
and the art world they are a rather inconvenient irrelevance. It is a
work that deserves more care and
After the break-up with Brian, Goldin became more and more addicted to
drugs. Many of her friends were also beginning to suffer from the
continued abuse of their bodies by alcohol and drugs. Worse still, she
had to face the loss of many of her friends, dying from Aids, and she
became involved in photographing a number of them
By 1988, Goldin was suffering so badly from drugs and alcohol she
decided to go into hospital for detox. They took her camera away and
she didn't know what to do. When she was transferred to a halfway
house, she got her camera back and started on an intensive series of
self-portraits, taken using available light.
These pictures were later to form the basis of another slide show,
together with other self-portraits over the years, called 'All by
Myself', created in 1995-6, using an Eartha Kitt soundtrack. Some
critics have found this too saccharine, too kitschy, but I find this
hard to sustain given the searing honesty of some of her pictures. To
me, the interplay between the images and the music, with their very
different emotional tones and depth, makes this one of her most
effective works. It's a piece that makes me warm to Goldin as a person
rather than simply admire her as an artist.
Goldin's idea that her photography is very much a way of keeping
memories of people alive is at its most explicit in a number of
sequences dedicated to the memory of friends who have died from Aids,
including 'The Cookie Mueller Portfolio, 1976-90', 'Gotscho + Gilles.
Paris, 1992-3' and 'Alf Bold Grid', that dominated her work in the
early nineties.
Greer Lankton, (1958-1996), who was born male and had a sex-change
operation in 1979 at the age of 21, is the subject of many fine
pictures by Goldin. She became well known for dolls and sculptural
installations, including a life-sized doll of famed fashion editor and
costume curator Diana Vreeland (1903-1989). Greer suffered from
alcohol and drug addiction and anorexia. There is a section of
pictures of her in 'The Other Side', probably the most effective part
of this book.
Goldin has described in an interview how she first heard about Aids in
1981, when she was with Cookie Mueller, Sharon, Cookie's lover, David
Armstrong, and a few others. Cookie read an article about a new
illness from the 'New York Times' and they all laughed it off, feeling
it wouldn't affect them. It was only the following year that their
first friend died from it, one of David's lovers.
According to John Waters, who first recognised her potential as a film
actress and directed her first film, "Cookie Mueller was a writer, a
mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a
witch-doctor, an art-hag, and above all, a goddess." Born in 1949 in
Baltimore, Cookie and Goldin became good friends in 1976. Her
photographs include a photograph of Cookie and Vittorio's wedding in
New York in 1986. The portfolio is a montage of pictures which follow
Cookie from the fullness of her life to her lying in the casket in
1989.
Gilles was her French art dealer. She photographed him with his lover
while he was still in good health and then a fine picture of the
couple in hospital. Alf Bold was a German friend who also died of
Aids.
In 1990, Goldin returned to photographing drag queens shooting in New
York clubs. However, by this time they were more or less a normal part
of the scene, no longer a fringe element as they had been almost
twenty years earlier in Boston. Pictures of drag queens were by now a
standard part of many if not most student portfolios! With a few
exceptions, such as a fine action picture, 'Jimmy Paulette on David's
bike. NYC 1991' where her flash catches the two riders in centre frame
against a blurred background, the results (also shown in 'The Other
Side') were disappointing.
Of more interest was the work from her collaboration with the Japanese
photography Nobuyoshi Araki(see the 'Directory of Photographers' -
link in box at right.) Araki is also a prolific photographer, and has
produced visual diaries for many years. Goldin went to meet him in
1992, and returned so they could work together on the book 'Tokyo
Love' in 1994. Their work is alternates throughout the book, mainly in
double pages, but with some sets or four or six pictures. Araki
contributes studio portraits of young adolescent girls, girls in their
first Tokyo spring.
Goldin's work is also of young people, but ranges more widely, with a
great picture of the 'Honda Brothers with falling Cherry Blossoms'
swirling like lilac snowflakes as they stand in the street, as well as
many people in clubs, homes and elsewhere. Goldin found people who
reminded her of a younger self, with the same attitudes, the same
beliefs she had as a teenager. Like her they had "transcended any
definitions of hetero or homosexual." She found the project was like a
journey back into an age of innocence, "before my community was
plagued by Aids and decimated by drug addiction" (Tokyo Love.)
Goldin started shooting movie film before she took up photography, and
the 'Ballad' can perhaps be seen as a film shot as stills. She has
often said in interviews that she would like to shoot films - and did
some for the BBC in the TV programme she made with them, 'I'll Be Your
Mirror' in 1996. She shot most of the interviews for the film,
including those with Gotscho, Sharon Niesp and her girlfriend, and
Greer Lankton. Some of her own early footage from her Boston years was
also used.
As she makes clear in an interview for 'Thirteen Online' with Kathy
High, she was not happy with the way the BBC's middle-class
Oxford-educated director took the film away from reality, shooting
things that would look good to a British audience but did not
represent how things had been. Also, bringing a 16mm film crew and
lights into relatively intimate situations changed their nature
completely, also falsified some of the scenes, removing them from the
ways that she really lived and worked. To her disappointment, much of
the footage Goldin herself shot for the film - including almost all of
that related to Aids - was never used.
She also makes the point that the film can't be updated, and is
forever stuck at a particular point in time. It is thus unlike the
'Ballad' and other slide shows that she has updated. Even a year later
many of the peoples lives had changed - Greer for example was dead,
but the film doesn't reflect that. I can't help thinking that a film
made with Goldin herself in charge would have had a far more lasting
interest, and that the BBC missed a great opportunity in imposing a
director with a different set of values. He may have made it a 'better
TV programme' with higher production values but at the expense of the
rigorous realism and often-uncomfortable truth central to Goldin's
work.
Goldin's more recent photography falls into two areas. She has
continued to work with couples, but has concentrated more on the idea
of intimacy and in photographing their more intimate moments,
producing series of images including 'First Love', 'French Family',
'The Boys', and 'Valerie and Bruno'. Pictures from these sequences,
along with some others have been combined in her latest slide
sequence, 'Heart Beat, 2001'. This is a passionate hymn to love, with
a soundtrack composed by John Taverner of the 'Kyrie Eleison' (Greek
for 'Lord Have Mercy'), part of the traditional Christian mass, which
is performed with amazing vocal agility and intensity by Björk.
Goldin has also been photographing scenes without people - landscapes,
interiors, skies, cityscapes etc under the title 'Elements'
(presumably a reference to Earth, Air, Fire and Water) which are often
curiously abstract. A second series 'Relics and Saints' concentrates
as its name suggests on religious imagery found in churches, grottoes
and catacombs.
There has I think also been a shift in the balance between the prints
and the slide presentations in Goldin's work. In the 'Ballad', the
slide presentation was clearly the important work, with the prints and
book illustrations serving to allow you to see the individual frames
at leisure (some only appear on screen for a short time.) The
portfolios such as 'Cookie Mueller' used a grid of smallish prints.
Her more recent work is shown as sequences or groups of very large
(1x1.5 metre) Cibachrome colour prints, and the sequences made later
using them appear to be secondary.
Goldin is one of few well-known fine art photographers who make some
original prints available at affordable prices. At many of her shows
she makes available a limited edition smaller Cibachrome at a
reasonable price (75UK pounds plus sales tax at her London show.) For
some shows the money raised by selling these prints has gone to Aids
charities. She still remembers the times when she was hard up and
interested in photography. It's a nice touch which I commend to other
photographers.
Thirty years after her first work in Boston, Nan Goldin is still
photographing, still showing us how the world looks to her, letting us
get inside, get insight into the life led by her and her friends. It
is a remarkable body of work, even if occasionally I feel a little
uncomfortable watching.
