Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin is an American photographer who started taking photographs as a teenager in Boston. These photographs was a record of the journey among the gay and transsexual communities her friend introduced her to. The celebrated the sub cultural living she now belonged to. After graduating from School of the Museum of Fine Arts - Boston University she began to immerse herself into the new age punk and gay scene, focusing her attention on peoples recreational drug use. These formed her most famous work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. These photographs depicted drug use, violent nature, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. These images were firstly displayed in night clubs where a lot of the images had been taken, they were shown with a soundtrack since as the titles of her series often come from songs. These images were later shown within galleries. Throughout her career she often took portraits of drag queens and later on began to photograph her friends who were suffering from AIDS, reflecting the environment she was in. Although these subject matters seem rather dark she also depicted loving moments such as family life and love. Her later work has seen her moving into film however it is the photographs that interest me.

During our trip to Berlin I was able to see some of Goldin’s work up close. When first glanced these images seemed to hold a 3D quality which instantly drew you in. These images were lit from behind and shown in a dark area, this technique seems to inject the photograph with a sense of life, somehow making the moment captured become more than a flat photograph but rather that, an intense moment frozen in time. The lighting also allowed the vivid or gloomy colours to intensify.

Goldin’s work instantly reminds me of one of my favourite musicals, RENT, which tells the story of impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive in a bohemian New York. Clouded by HIVE/AIDS and substance abuse they take art as their outlet. Its this concept of a Generation X which interests me (a theme used by one of my favourite artists David Hancock) the idea of a rebellious culture, for example, the mods, punks and bohemians. What strengthens this musicals is the real life experience from the creator Jonathan Larson, this is also apparent in Goldin’s work.

This is the reason I feel Goldin’s work fits in to my own. Slightly moving away from my initial statement talking about the use of information in a quite serious manor I’m now starting to look at the information in a personal manor and how we as individuals say what we want to say, through the use of statues, tweets and photographs on social networking sights. The photographs that appear on each individuals Facebook profile are their own personal series of autobiographical works.