“I knew from a very early age, that what I saw on TV had nothing to do with real life. So I wanted to make a record of real life. That included having a camera with me at all times.” -Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin says she got her artistic voice from a Polaroid camera. “I was at what was known at the time as a ‘hippy free school.’ Teachers went to M.I.T. graduate school to study education. They got a grant from Polaroid which is located at M.I.T. and they gave us Polaroids.” she said, “and I took off immediately on it. It was … finally I had a voice. It gave me an entre into human contact basically.”
Drag
Nan Goldin’s first show was in Boston. She was 15. It showed the group of drag queens she was hanging out with.
“I wished I could put them on the cover of Vogue because all I knew about photography came from the fashion magazines. I was a good shoplifter and I would steal Italian and French ‘Vogue’ and we’d pore over them for hours. The queens would fight over my photographs and rip up the ones they hated,” Goldin said.
Compared to Arbus
Nan Goldin was compared to photographer Diane Arbus who photographed people who were different often being called “freaks.”
Upon seeing Arbus’s work, Golden said, “What I remember most is that all the queens I knew hated her. Violently. In her portraits of drag queens, she stripped them and showed them as men. To me, the queens were not men. My work was much more respectful to them. I’ve never thought of a drag queen as a man. That’s really the last thing I think about when I look at them. They weren’t women either, by the way, they were another species.”
In an interview with Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian, Goldin spoke about LGBTQ people, “That was way before all this transgender crap. Fucking postmodern and gender theory. I mean, who gives a shit? People made all that crap up to get jobs in universities. I once told my students to just take LSD if they wanted to see the world clearly. You can see why I didn’t really fit in as an academic, but they still ask me to come back and teach.”
The “Ballad”
Nan Goldin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1977 and moved to New York City. There she took the photographs that would become “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (opening photo). The subjects weren’t outsiders. To her, they were family.
“[we were] bonded not by blood, but by a similar morality, the need to live fully and for the moment.” In finding and celebrating this surrogate family, Goldin was also acknowledging her sister, who, as she once put it, “was born at the wrong time and had no tribe, no other people like her.” Her sister had killed herself by lying on the tracks of a commuter rail train. She was 11.
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was a projected slideshow of almost 700 portraits in snapshot fashion from Goldin’s life around Boston, New York, Berlin and other places during the latter part of the 1970s and ’80s and even after that. The people in the show including Goldin herself are shown in moments, intimate ones, of love and of loss. They use drugs and sex to feel euphoric and pain, too. They suffer from domestic violence and from AIDS. The Ballad is a personal diary of Goldin’s.
“The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.”
Nan and Brian
In 1984, Brian and Nan were living in Berlin. One photograph from the Ballad of the couple shows Brian smoking with Nan lying on the bed staring at him (opening photo, top row, lower small image).
Goldin, in an interview with Hilton Als writing in The New Yorker, says “Brian was dope-sick. We were staying at a pensione, and he started beating me, and he went for my eyes, and later they had to stitch my eye back up because it was about to fall out of the socket. He burned my journals, and the sick thing was that there were people around who knew us and who wouldn’t help me. He wrote ‘Jewish-American Princess’ in lipstick on the mirror.”
Goldin traveled back to the U.S. where a hospital saved her eye. During her recovery, she made a self-portrait titled “Nan one month after being battered (opening photo, top row, upper small image.)
“The Ballad” was published in book form in 1986 and reprinted in 2015 by Aperture.
Sources: Guggenheim, The Guardian, MoMA
