Nan Goldin: I'll be Your Mirror

Product Information

Reconstructing early-modern religious lives: the exemplary and the mundane / 2. Another Vision of Empire. Henry Rider Haggard’s Modernity and Legacy

Le discours rapporté et l’expression de la subjectivité / 2.Modernist Non-fictional Narratives of War and Peace (1914-1950) 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. 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.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 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. 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. ” A lot of people seem to think that art or photography is about the way things look, or the surface of things. That’s not what it’s about for me. It’s really about relationships and feelings. . . . It’s not about a style or a look or a setup. It’s about emotional obsession and empathy.

In 1989 Goldin curated the first art exhibition in New York about AIDS, “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.” Mounted at Artists Space, it included work by Armstrong, diCorcia, Lankton, Morrisroe, Peter Hujar, Vittorio Scarpati, Kiki Smith, and David Wojnarowicz. “I am often filled with rage at my sense of powerlessness in the face of this plague,” Goldin wrote in one of the show catalogue’s essays. “I want to empower others by providing them a forum to voice their grief and anger in the hope that this public ritual of mourning can be cathartic in the process of recovery, both for those among us who are ill and those survivors who are left behind.” The United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s was experiencing the emancipation of the mind. Women’s Liberation Movement, Sexual Liberation Movement, Ecstasy Culture, Hippies, and Anti-war Movement, etc, have emerged in the United States. At same time, the hippie culture of the West Coast changed the attitudes and ways of life of young Americans, and in the frenzy of sexual liberation, a large number of LGBT groups began to respond. They abandon the secular ethical constraints, liberate themselves, admire freedom, that deeply attract Nan Goldin, who runs counter to traditional class thinking. 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. Cross-Dressing in Fact, Fiction and Fantasy / 2. Transnationalism and Modern American Women Writers

A Book in the Life

course, Nan Goldin’s narratives are activated by the appearance of recurring characters —Gina, Bruce, Cookie, Sharon, Gilles —people we see again and again, people we see evolve over the years. This repetition brings us close to the heart of the matter. Says Goldin: “To represent someone what is needed is not a photo, but an accumulation of photos. I don’t believe in the single portrait. I believe only in the accumulation of portraits as a representation of a person. Because I think people are really complex” (Armstrong and Keller, 454). Essentially then, Nan Goldin’s signature is not in the isolated unit, like that of a photograph by Edward Weston, it is in the sequence. This is how the artist herself puts it: “My genius, if I have any, is in the slideshows, in the narratives. It is not in making perfect images. It is in the groupings of work” (Mazur, np).