Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror

Product Information

Delvaux, Martine et Jamie Herd. “Comment faire apparaître Écho ? Sœurs, saintes et sibylles de Nan Goldin et Autoportrait en vert de Marie Ndiaye.” Protée, volume 35, number 1, printemps 2007, 29–39. https://doi.org/10.7202/015886ar Web. 3 May. 2023. 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. 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. Perhaps it is this deep-rooted cinephilia that critics sense when they describe Goldin’s photographs as “cinematic.” Goldin has dedicated her career to documenting her life, as well as the lives of her friends and chosen family. Her “subjects,” many of whom are as charismatic, stylish, and memorable as movie stars, become characters, their unfolding lives transformed into storylines which unfurl across hundreds of diaristic, richly detailed photographs. In series such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981-6), Goldin follows her characters across the years, constructing in the process a sweeping portrait of a time, place, and community, from the explosive creativity of New York’s queer art scene to the devastation of the AIDS crisis. Goldin’s key themes—sex, relationships, addiction, death—are grand and, yes, cinematic; the stuff of real life and, therefore, also the stuff of movies.

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. Standardisation and Variation in English Language(s) / 2. Modernist Non-fictional Narratives: Rewriting Modernism Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-10-17 14:12:39 Associated-names Goldin, Nan, 1953-; Armstrong, David, 1954-2014; Holzwarth, Hans Werner; Whitney Museum of American Art Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40737419 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Barthes, Roland. “Délibération.” Le bruissement de la langue. Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1984, 399-413.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. Just as Goldin’s career was taking off, she fell deeper and deeper into drug addiction. “The party was over but I couldn’t stop,” she said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. “I stayed shut up in my loft snorting drugs, going months without seeing daylight.” She entered a rehab clinic outside Boston and got sober in 1988. When she returned to New York, she found that many of her friends had contracted AIDS.

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

Full text issues

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. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Ballad would take on new meaning as a portrayal of a closeknit queer community right before the wave of destruction that was the AIDS epidemic. “I used to think I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost,” Goldin said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. “It wasn’t until the first year of my sobriety that I confronted the reality as I watched a number of my friends die. I photographed some of them while they were ill to try to keep them alive and to leave traces of their lives. It was then I realized how little photography could preserve.” Coellier Sylvie, dir. Des émotions dans les arts aujourd’hui. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2015. Relating / L'Écosse en relation / 2. Religion & civil society in Britain and the English-speaking world – What’s the English for “ laïcité”? When we think of Goldin’s love and understanding of queer subculture, she presents the articulation of drag as a form of authentic self-expression. Jimmy Paulette is not quite dressed yet, but he is in a state of becoming. He is not vulnerable. He is relaxed and confident.

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. Ibars, Stéphane. “Entretien avec Yvon Lambert” in Nan Goldin. Trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods. Les Cahiers de la Collection Lambert. Arles : Actes Sud, 2020.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.” In 2007 Goldin won the prestigious Hasselblad Award. In 2010 the Louvre commissioned a slideshow and exhibition; Goldin titled it Scopophilia and intermixed her own images with those of historical works in the museum’s collections (from figures in Greek mythology to Rembrandt, Delacroix, and beyond)—drawing direct connections between depictions of desire, sexuality, gender, and violence over thousands of years. Few photographers can boast a body of work as deep and uncompromisingly honest as that of Nan Goldin. Internationally renowned for her documentation of love, fluid sexuality, glamour, beauty, death, intoxication and pain, Goldin’s photographs feature her life and those in it. Her visual language and “social portraiture” approach not only rejects the conventional limits of the medium of photography, it creates something unique: a mirror of herself, as well as the world.