Nan Goldin's Visual Diary
American photo artist Nan Goldin is known primarily for her work "The Ballad of Sexual Addiction". This is a series of diary photos. Personal stories of painful, funny, bitter moments — that's what Goldin's narrative consists of for the most part.
Nan Goldin was not yet twelve when her older 18-year-old sister committed suicide. According to the psychiatrist examining the Nas, she was threatened with the same fate; but the girl broke the "family curse": at the age of 14, she ran away from home and plunged into a world whose main components were sex, alcohol and drugs.
Nan took her first photos at her sister's funeral, later she recalled that these pictures were for her a means of self-identification, a way of realizing her place between life and death. After leaving home, she photographed her surroundings: drug addicts, transvestites, homosexuals, and other representatives of the "bohemian". She shot (and continues to shoot) in a manner dubbed "raw insider" (raw — raw, unprocessed; insider — her own, not an outsider); simply put, as an amateur photographer who prefers non-stop shots takes pictures for a family album.
In 1986, Nan Goldin published the book "The Ballad of Sexual Addiction", which was a tremendous success and put the author on a par with the best photographers of the XX century. It was the first visual diary in the history of photography — a chronicle of the sexual and everyday life of Nan. Not every "family photo album" is awarded such an honor, but Nan Goldin's "family" and that forbidden fruit, which her works are simply stuffed with, seemed extremely attractive to the American, and later to the world public.
We publish scanned photos from a book by Phaidon publishing house, which includes the best pictures of Goldin with comments by Guido Costa.
Goldin often witnessed very intimate moments from the lives of her close friends. This picture seems to express how Nan perceives the situation of a kind of alienation that often occurs between a man and a woman after sex. There is often a great distance in intimacy — a paradox that Goldin was able to explore in her most famous work, The Ballad of Sexual Addiction.
Among the photos taken at parties and scattered throughout the "Ballad" as a leitmotif, this is certainly one of the most memorable. Loneliness in a crowd and sadness as the inevitable antithesis of intoxication with fun are the hallmarks of that period of Goldin's work, combining passion for life in the community and attention to individual destinies.
Cookie Muller — an actress, poet and cultural activist of the New York underground scene of the early 1980s - was a close friend of Nan for many years, her muse and guru. This photo is part of the famous photo series about Cookie, in which Nan tells the story of her friend, starting with their first meeting in Provincetown in 1976 and ending with her death from AIDS in November 1989. Here is Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, the club where Goldin worked for a while as a bartender and where she often presented her early work in a slide show format.
Kat is a musician whom Goldin met during her first stay in Germany.
This picture shows the aftermath of Goldin's tumultuous relationship with her boyfriend Brian and is one of her most ruthless self-portraits. The injuries she received almost cost her the loss of vision in her left eye. From the point of view of the symbolism of the "Ballad of Sexual Addiction", this photo marks the end of a beautiful dream and the beginning of a period of complete transformation.
In 1986, Cookie married Vittorio Scarpati, a Neapolitan artist who lived in New York. It was Vittorio who introduced Goldin to the prejudice-free world of Positano, a small town on the Amalfi coast in Italy, where they all spent part of the summer of that year together. Vittorio also died of AIDS in 1989, though a few months earlier than Cookie. Nan included some of these images not only in the photo series about Cookie, but also in the first section of her book "Naples. Ten years later", 1998.
Like Cookie, Sharon has been a frequent subject of Goldin's photographs for many years. Her masculine beauty often acted as a perfect counterbalance to Cookie's feminine sensuality. This picture caught former lovers and friends at a tragic moment marked by the progress of the disease, which in a few months will shorten Cookie's life. It was Sharon who became Cookie's nurse when Cookie couldn't even talk anymore. And this is despite the photo on the wall depicting Cookie's wedding to a man after eight years of a love relationship with Sharon.
The deaths of Vittorio and Cookies with a difference of months affected Goldin so deeply that they caused fundamental changes in the way she photographed, and marked the beginning of her more thoughtful approach to work. This photo of Vittorio's funeral is like a last act of love for deceased friends.
Some of Nan Goldin's most beautiful and tender photos are dedicated to Siobhan, her friend and partner for several years in the early 1990s. This is a tribute to the love between women.
Goldin and her friends, including Gina, used Bruce's house for dinner, during which the photographer showed her slides to everyone present. In this photo, Gina is waiting for the second portion of cutlets.
Jimmy Paulette, Taboo! , Cody, Misty, Guy and other transvestites were the most famous subjects of Nan Goldin's photographs taken in New York, Paris and Berlin between 1990 and 1992. This frame, chosen as the cover for the book "The Other Side", is one of the most popular pictures of Goldin.
Goldin's political views led her to participate in initiatives and demonstrations of the gay community and people with AIDS. This photo was taken on the way to the New York Gay Pride Parade in 1991 and is one of the most replicated pictures of the Nas.
Along with the Cookie series, the photo history of Gilles and Gotcho's relationship is undoubtedly one of the Nas' most touching and dark projects. Gilles, the owner of the Paris gallery where Goldin exhibited, was one of the first to support her work. He died of AIDS in 1992. With great sympathy, Nan describes the last months of his life, from the manifestation of the disease to his death in the hospital. Gotcho, his partner, was always there for him.
The tenderness of this last farewell is derived from the contrast between two men, one of whom is destroyed by illness, and the other is in good physical health.
Lillian is Goldin's mother, and she has photographed her in various situations for many years, alone and with her husband. This photo, in which Lil appears especially happy, is part of a longer series of shots in an informal, homely setting.
The cycle to which this frame belongs (it was originally intended for the French newspaper "Liberation") marks the beginning of what can be considered as the "Paris period" of Goldin.
Joan, a young French opera singer, was one of Goldin's favorite subjects at the turn of the century. Nan has always been fascinated by the grammar of female beauty and found in Joan a perfect example of seductive power.
Sexuality has always been a dominant theme in Goldin's work. But in this photo taken in Nan's apartment, there is a certain amount of formal composition that was not seen in other pictures of Nan of the same kind, for example, from "Ballad".
In 2007, Nan received the Hasselblad Award, one of the most prestigious photographic awards. In the 2000s, after many years of experience shooting adults, Goldin focused her attention on children. She took mostly pictures of her godchildren and the children of friends.