Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror

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Nan believes that this is the ultimate act of autonomous independence. In decades of photography life, Nan is not shooting her transvestites, transgenders, and gay friends, but set up a mirror to faithfully reflect the world. She insists on telling people the truth: physical limitations do not hinder the height of the spirit. Relating / L'Écosse en relation / 2. Religion & civil society in Britain and the English-speaking world – What’s the English for “ laïcité”? 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.

Sartorius, Joachim. “Deep Pictures of Us All”. I’ll Be Your Mirror. New York : Whitney Museum of Art, 1996. In her photos, everything is real and there are no fictional elements. “I don’t like the forged world, we need the real world, so we need photography as evidence to tell us the truth,” Golding said.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).

Part of what made The Ballad feel so refreshing was the way that Goldin drew on cinematic techniques in her photography, using carefully arranged sequences of images to invite the viewer to form narratives over time. In All The Beauty, Poitras highlights the filmic quality of Goldin’s work, dedicating long sections of the film to processions of images, set against music and voiceover, which are delivered in the style of the artist’s famous slideshows. At the same time, Poitras also lingers on single images, and in doing so draws out the inherently filmic quality of Goldin’s individual compositions. 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 Mazur, Adam and Paulina Skirgajllo-Krajewska. “Nan Goldin interviewed by Adam Mazur and Paulina Skirgajllo-Krajewska,” foto tapeta, Warsaw, February 2003, http://fototapeta.art.pl/2003/ngie.php Web. 13 April. 2021. 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

Activism and Work in the 1990s

Hujar and Morrisroe had already died of AIDS before the exhibition opened, as had Scarpati, Cookie Mueller’s husband. At the end of her essay, Goldin included a photo she’d taken of a grieving Mueller in front of her husband’s open casket. Mueller, too, would die of AIDS just a month after Goldin wrote the essay. Wojnarowicz would succumb to the disease in 1992. (Adding insult to injury, the National Endowment for the Arts initially withdrew its funding of the exhibition due to its “political” nature, but reinstated it as long as the money wasn’t used for the catalogue, where the “political” language appeared.) 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.

Arbus’ young man in curlers is relaxed as well. But the mood is different. Like Jimmy Paulette, he is not dressed yet and he’s in between his masculine and soon-to-be feminine expressions of self. Arbus is prodding at his psyche. She’s investigating the young man’s liminal state within his own state of becoming. She’s curious about him, but she is less invested in his authentic self than his naked self. Is an investment in one better than the other? It does raise questions about authenticity and intention, but the world of documentary photography is full of practitioners who have their own agendas. 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.” 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. It can be said that Nan Goldin is a very talented female photographer. Before her, few photographers paid attention to and continued to shoot LGBT groups and related subcultures. Besides, few people realized that LGBT groups have dignity and bottom line. Transgenders and transvestites living on the edge of the city have allowed Nan to see a non-traditional, alternative idealized country: a country that is free to control its own destiny.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 » work of Nan Goldin is a dialogue between the self and the other and, in her own words, a “struggle between intimacy and autonomy” (MoCA), an account of how the I can approach the you without losing itself (or, in the Ballad’s terms, without withdrawal symptoms). “Nan Goldin: I’ll be Your Mirror” was the title of an exhibition and a publication in 1996 by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2020 the Collection Lambert in Avignon, which contains a great many of Goldin’s self-portraits, held a show with a similar title that presented a large section devoted to Goldin. The latter exhibition has served in the present article which contends that when Goldin’s photographs reflect specific others, the artist is reflecting herself, and ultimately, the viewer. 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.When I was a kid people would say, You didn’t see that; that didn’t happen […] You know, there was this web of denial […] And the only way I could feel that I could survive that, and maintain my own truth, was to start writing a diary when I was really young. […] Writing was the way I held on to my version of things… […] When I started taking pictures, I realized it was a way to make a real record of what I had actually seen and done.” (Armstrong and Keller 451) why, we might wonder, does Goldin prefer her visual diary, why is this public while her written one is private? The reason is surely that the photograph is indexical; it says “this was here” and “this cannot be denied.” Of course, we are talking about photography of the pre-digital age and of a pre-Photoshop time when Barthes could write in La chambre claire that “for certain The Photograph says what has been” ( Camera Lucida 85). It is for this “unmediated” truth that Goldin feels photographs not only record what happened, but also trigger memory in a way that, for her, writing does not (Goldin 6). She is talking here about the way the photograph interacts with memory for the photographer and the sitter, but she may also be suggesting that it provokes a stronger emotion too for a viewer who is not directly involved in the scene of the snapshot. Armstrong, David and Walter Keller. “Conversation”. I’ll Be Your Mirror, New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1996. have examined the ways Goldin’s photographic work is a portrait of the self: first in the literal self-portraits, then in the portraits of self and friends in the same frame, and more largely in the “family portraits.” I will now explore how the construction of Goldin’s work is akin to verbal autobiography. For this, I would like to make use of an idea formulated by Eric Marty while editing Roland Barthes. For Barthes, Marty tells us, thinking is anchored not so much in concepts, but in the rhythm of writing: “Le vrai lieu où la pensée vibre, pour lui, ce n'est pas le concept, mais la phrase rythmée” (Birnbaum, np). II. Le vrai lieu où la pensée vibre