Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror

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with Rembrandt and Courbet, we find in Goldin’s œuvre a number of portraits of the artist in the frame with her friends, notably Nan and Brian in Bed (1983) the picture of the artist and Brian , her toxic lover chosen for the cover of The Ballad. However, the basic tenet of the œuvre of Nan Goldin is, I would argue, that even when the artist herself is not represented, most works, and especially those in The Ballad, lean towards the self-portrait. Goldin is representing herself through what she has called her family. In other words, Gina, Gilles, Suzanne, Brian, Dieter, Cookie, Ryan, and Mark, these specific others with whom she identifies are her “tribe” (Armstrong and Keller 454) and are part of herself. The result is that whether a photograph is of Nan or of one or some of her friends, the viewer’s experience is like that of the reader of a verbal autobiography when presented with the significant figures in the author’s life story. The viewer and reader are “privy to the author’s sense of self” and of what constitutes her identity, a sense of oneself performed and often theatricalized by the mirror (Armstrong and Keller 449).

MoCA TV, “Nan Goldin on The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” Video directed by Emma Reeves. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cYWw0P7dxI Web. 3 May. 2023. Including our parents, the mass media has nurtured us, made us social, gave us entertainment, comforted us, it deceived us, and bound us, telling us what to do, what should not to do. In the process of transforming us from a woman of personality to the same person, it plays the most critical role: through American printing presses, projectors and TV channels, it shapes us into traditionally good women and bad women. For the female concept, these are already the most important legacy of the public media: put all the neatness into one. ”Le discours rapporté et l’expression de la subjectivité / 2.Modernist Non-fictional Narratives of War and Peace (1914-1950) Coellier Sylvie, dir. Des émotions dans les arts aujourd’hui. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2015.

In the text for her book, Goldin described The Ballad as a “visual diary” to share with the world. But whereas Robert Frank’s concerns were largely documentary, she was adamant that her pictures “come out of relationships, not observation,” and she included many self-portraits. (A more apt comparison may be to Larry Clark, whose autobiographical 1971 photo book, Tulsa, Goldin has cited as an inspiration.) Goldin wrote in The Ballad, “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.” 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. In “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, Nan also preserved her many years of memories: the death of family and friends, the breakdown of relationship, the gathering of friends, and Naomi wearing a gorgeous dance dress with laughing. . Through these photos, Nan not only reveals the fragile and sensitive side of human nature, but also expresses the relationship between desire and loss, joy and sorrow, sex and lovelorn, which seemingly contradictory but symbiotic coexists. She first wants to prove is the universal theme of human destruction: the inevitable collapse of love relationships, the indulgence of desires, the loss of loved ones and friends, and the illusion of escape from reality. Staniszewski, Mary Anne. The Power of Display. A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001.

Kaplan, Louis. “Photography and the exposure of community: Reciting Nan Goldin’s Ballad.” American Exposures. University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 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.

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 sense that the other two,” as she explained in her 1995 documentary, I’ll Be Your Mirror. She wanted to be a fashion photographer and dreamed of putting the queens on the cover of Vogue.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. 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. Relating / L'Écosse en relation / 2. Religion & civil society in Britain and the English-speaking world – What’s the English for “ laïcité”? In the 1990s, as The Ballad slideshow toured museums worldwide, Goldin gathered her photos of Mueller and created a portfolio and exhibition dedicated to her. She started photographing empty rooms, landscapes, and skylines. She collected a decade’s worth of her photographs of drag queens for a book and exhibition titled The Other Side. She and Armstrong created a two-person show and accompanying book called A Double Life. In 1994 she collaborated with Nobuyoshi Araki on Tokyo Love, a project photographing young people in Tokyo’s underground cultures. In 1996, her mid-career retrospective, I’ll Be Your Mirror, opened at the Whitney before touring Europe. Armstrong, David and Walter Keller. “Conversation”. I’ll Be Your Mirror, New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1996.