[tylw]

No Nan Goldin thread?

here's a recent slideshow she did for the NYT with various It girls and women in haute couture:

Capturing Couture
Nan Goldin
NYT

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html...html?#section1

[VICTIM]

her stuff is amazing i prefer her older non fashion photography stuff.

when i was modelling last year she shot me for the new york times, one of the most amazing people i've ever met she's so inspireing, she's so crazy - so are her assistants.

[BerlinRocks]

She is one of the most inspirational photographer for the 90s.....!!!!
She had a lot of influence on fashion photography!!
Ryan McGinley is one of her "son" in photography/fashion photography to me....

[tylw]

^^yes, i agree her first book was probably her best. i also have no doubt she is slightly looney.

[FairyTears]

This is the first time i've encounted Goldin, and was absolute amazed by her, what an inspiring artist, I'm a big fan of Juergen Teller, with all the saturated pictures but Godin is in a complete different level

[FairyTears]

Quote:

Originally Posted by tylw No Nan Goldin thread? here's a recent slideshow she did for the NYT with various It girls and women in haute couture: Capturing Couture Nan Goldin NYT http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html...html?#section1

Thankyou for the wonderful link as well, great slide show <3

[Diamond Star]

Thank you for starting a thread on Nan tylw

Profile from helium.com:

Nan Goldin ( 1953 - present ) is a contemporary American fine-art and documentary photographer, and indeed is one of the leading contemporary photographers to have successfully combined the two genres. She is often compared to Diane Arbus ( 1923 - 1971 ) and can be seen to have influenced the styles of a diverse range of contemporary photographers, such as Nobuyoshi Araki ( 1940 - present ) and Larry Clarke ( 1943 - present ). Goldin is credited with the creation of "Heroin Chic" and was blamed for its prevalence in the fashion industry by then-President elect Bill Clinton. She was also a pioneer in gaining acceptance for the use of color film in the Fine Art photography world, although it has been variously claimed that this was as a result of accidentally using a roll of color film rather than the Black and White more common to the field, or that she couldn't afford the use of a developing room at some early points in her career.

The focus of her early work is a documentation and reinterpretation of intimate moments between members of her friends and those she has chosen as her surrogate "family", as well as self portraits of key moments in her life. Her early style follows the contemporary American trend of the snapshot aesthetic - quick, almost unposed photographs taken in available light. Her more recent, later works have become more impersonal and have included land- and sea- scapes as well as children and childhood and seem to be following more general themes of innocence and tranquility, rather than the earlier, more claustrophobic subject matter. The style in these works is more formal and composed, which may be a conscious decision or a reflection of Goldin's mature technical skill with a camera.
Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., and was raised in Maryland for much of her early childhood. She ran away from home and was fostered by a variety of families in her teens. Her sister also committed suicide at a very early age, events which set the tone for much of her life and work. During 1968 in Boston, Goldin was introduced to photography at the age of fifteen, and progressed to study and graduate from the Boston Tufts University with a qualification in Fine Arts in the 1977/78 academic year. Before she had ever graduated she was presenting solo shows, based on her photography of the transvestite and drag queen communities of Boston. Her early shows tended to be in the format of a slide-show, and screened in the fashion of a movie. Goldin's early work, after all, was before photography was fully accepted as a Fine Art form, but her work was one of the key reasons for its eventual acceptance.

Goldin moved to New York after graduation and became involved in - and documented - the emergent post-punk scene in the city, as well as continuing to capture images of the vibrant gay and transsexual subcultures. She became very involved in the Bowery area scene and began using hard drugs, even as she continued to document her life and lifestyle. Her pieces from this era are probably the most iconic and famous, certainly the most referenced, of Goldins, and were released as a series known as *The Ballad of Sexual Dependency*. The works that form "The Ballad..." is a very personal reflection on sexual relationships, domestic violence, substance abuse, so-called alternative lifestyles and male social isolation. Of equal relevance as the pictures in Goldin's essay which accompanies the photography, talking of her psychological need to use the camera to document her version of her history. It is this dedication to the personal, subjective vision as well as her fine art qualification that makes "The Ballad..." and following works so noteworthy - Goldin is not engaging in simple journalism, she is displaying her vision of her lifestyle, the times she is it living in and how it affects her and those around her.

The series was followed by others, "I'll be your mirror" and "All by Myself" as well as more solo shows and widespread acclaim. Her work was criticized for making heroin use seem glamorous, but that seems to have mostly been as a reaction to her style being appropriated by magazines such as The Face and i-D. Goldin herself has said that the use of the heroin chic aesthetic to sell clothes was "reprehensible and evil". Her aim was to portray her subjective vision and chronicle every aspect of her life, not supply false narratives or universal aesthetics suitable for marketing. If proof were needed, most of Goldins subjects were dead by the mid 1990's from AIDS or drug abuse and overdoses. These collections of photographs were depicting their reality, not an invention.

Her relationship with her then-husband Brian and her drug dependency - she herself described it as 'this big love affair that was sort of a threesome between him and me and drugs' - eventually led to him almost killing her in a Berlin hotel room. She was battered so badly she almost lost the sight in her left eye. And, as always, she documented the incident with her camera, taking one of her most visually harrowing photographs "Nan one month after being battered". She left Brian and spent a period of four years ( 1984 - 1988 ) engaging in even heavier drug abuse, vicious relationships and tellingly, taking very few photographs. She entered rehabilitation for substance addiction and became clean, but unsure at that period in her life if she would or could produce her art again. Eventually she re-engaged with her work and began to use the camera as a way to rebuild herels and her self-image, photographing constant self-portraits and beginning to work with sunlight as opposed to indoor, available light sources.

The deaths of so many of her subjects also marks the turning in her career towards her recent style, particularly that of Dorothy "Cookie" Mueller (1949 - 1989) the actress and novelist and often-photographed subject of Goldin's, who died from AIDS at the end of the eighties. As discussed earlier, this work has turned towards landscapes, including the New York skyline and waterscapes, often including figures of women in water, her then lover, Siobhan, and babies, childhood and family life. Goldin is very much in demand in the contemporary art world and art market, and many of her recent projects have been collaborative in nature. She has worked on a book project - "Tokyo Love" with the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki and released the collection "The Devil's Playground" - a book project which included written pieces from authors like Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen while offering an in-depth retrospective of her whole career from her early Boston years to the present. Bjork has also collaborated with her, creating the soundtrack to a recent slide-show piece, "Heartbeat".

Nan Goldin is still living a very active and still - at times - troubled life. She has worked on fashion photo-shoots and still chronicles friends who are living with AIDS, although these images tend to be less troubled now that treatment in the Western world has improved and her subjects are more comfortable with their bodies and their condition. She suffered some damage to her hand in 2002 from a fall into a empty swimming pool on the set of Mira Nair's film Monsoon Wedding in New Delhi. Subsequent surgery was unsuccessful and she is unable to turn her hand with previous facility. She was awarded the 2007 Hassleblad award, the international prize from the estate of the inventor of the Hassleblad photography system. She continues to exhibit widely and is represented by the agents of the Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

[Diamond Star]

Jamie King:


Kate Moss:

mocp.org, sexualityinart.wordpress.com

[Diamond Star]

One of my favourites:
Simon and Jessica in the pool, Avignon, 2001

{lamontagnegallery.com}

[MissMagAddict]

Source | UK Guardian | May 2008

Quote:

'My camera has saved my life' From New York's druggy nightlife to her parents 'making out', Nan Goldin chronicles the real and the raw. She talks to Angelique Chrisafis about art, pornography and tabloid critics Nan Goldin leads me into the bedroom of her Paris apartment, fluffs up a pillow and settles down on her bed, lighting a cigarette. Her pink dressing gown hangs over the door of her wardrobe; there are black and white stills on the wall. It's fitting that the legendary photographer should want us to talk in her bedroom, side by side on the patterned bedspread: long before Tracey Emin's unmade chaos, Goldin specialised in the silences of rumpled sheets. Since the early 1970s, she has shot herself and friends in bed - having sex, sleeping, arguing and, after Aids struck, dying. She curled up with her boyfriend Brian, and later shot a bruised self-portrait after he hit her. Down the corridor, in Goldin's living room, among her collection of religious relics and Virgin Mary statues, a pair of assistants are finalising two slide-shows, to be projected in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern this weekend; there will be specially composed live music. One slide-show, The Other Side, starts with the drag queens Goldin lived with in the 1970s in Boston: "Normal people thought they were freaks, gay men didn't like them at all, and lesbians thought they were mocking women. Literally, they couldn't go out in the day time." The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her master-work, will be shown in a new edit, bringing together pictures starting in the 1970s, from the New York underground scene, its drug highs and bitter come-downs, interspersed with a more recent love of light and landscapes - as well as her 90-year-old parents "making out". The slide-shows, which Goldin calls "a film in stills", were first shown in bars to the people in the photographs. Photographing them, she wanted to hang on to them, but many of the people smiling and partying have since died from Aids. Goldin's most powerful subject is herself, in every state of naked hope and desperation, from heroin high (she is a former addict) to rehab. But when we meet she is on edge because a Guardian photographer will be arriving to take her portrait. She is not used to being photographed by a stranger, and almost never photographs strangers herself. She always shoots people she says she has "some kind of love for". "Somebody I used to photograph constantly said it was no different from drinking a cup of coffee with me. I mean it became an extension of me, the camera," she says. "I never photograph out of hate, and I never photograph somebody I find ugly. Everyone I photograph comes out of desire. They touch me, or I find their face fascinating. And I don't think I've ever taken a mean picture intentionally in my life." Goldin was born into a middle-class family in Washington DC. When she was 11, her elder sister Barbara, then 18, killed herself by lying on the railway tracks of a commuter train. The psychiatrists predicted Goldin would go the same way. She left home as a teenager, living with foster families and in communes, trying to escape what she calls "the same family histories". She went to a hippy school, where teachers gave her a Polaroid she became obsessed with. "It became a way to talk to people and make contact. I used to call it a form of safe sex. But it was never voyeuristic." After art school, she moved to Boston, and later to New York, to the punk and club scene, and drink and drugs. "My knowledge of my sister's experience becomes stronger and stronger," she says. In 2004 she photographed the mental hospitals and locked wards her sister had been in, and visited the train tracks where she died. Goldin has also photographed her own hospital stays, most recently in pyjamas in her room in the Priory, in London in 2002. She tries to photograph everything she goes through. "My camera has saved my life. It's made bearable things that feel unbearable." She despairs at still being known, as she puts it, as "that woman photographer who photographed the downtown New York scene in the late 70s and early 80s of marginalised people, drug addicts and prostitutes. Marginalised from whom?" she sighs, exhaling smoke. "We didn't want to be part of the 'straight' or 'normal' community. We were a community by choice." She says she is neither a voyeur nor a narcissist. "In between those two things, there are a million other options, like compassion, curiosity, real interest in other people, the desire to understand other people's experience." Last year the Baltic gallery on Tyneside called in the police to look at one of Goldin's pictures, a naked two-year-old limbo dancing under her belly-dancing sister. The picture, part of a series owned by Elton John, was eventually deemed not indecent. But Goldin felt the affair was a bit of publicity-seeking by the gallery. "For me the picture is about sisters and worshipping your older sister. The fact that her vagina is in the foreground had no effect on me selecting it when I was editing," she says. "It was written in the tabloids that I was a 51-year-old junkie who made my fame or living by photographing pornographic pictures of young girls. I was shocked. I never took pornography. I hate pornography. I knew a lot of people who worked in the sex trade when I worked in a bar on Times Square. I knew pimps and prostitutes, and I knew friends who entered the sex trade to make money to do their art. So I was familiar with the world of pornography, and I always found it distressing and based on contempt. To me, pornography is all about money. That's the difference between pornography and art." She has never given much thought to her audience or the art world and the marketing that goes with it, but says she has been thinking about it lately "when I'm feeling down. I mean the only thing I have left is my integrity." Goldin sees herself as a defender of the real, the raw, the unaltered. She hates computers, Photoshop, even Google and email. When the photographer arrives and takes a Hasselblad camera from his bag - unusually, because it takes longer to send to the paper, he has decided to shoot on film - she says that had it been a digital camera, she would have refused. "I gave a lecture last May, and I asked how many people still think a photograph can be real, and out of 150 people I think five raised their hand. And that's the whole reason I started taking photos: to make a record against revisionism, against any one revising my life or what I saw".

[robot]

thnx

[weoui]

mooore pics!

amazing photographer!

[kasper!]

It's a little bit late..

Quote:

Nan Goldin photographed Mariacarla & Veruschka in Paris on January 24-26, 2008 (stylist: Beat Bolliger) for the New York Times Magazine.

womenmanagement

[ponytrot]

she's facinating! thanks for post

[tarsha]

LULA F/W 10.11

Charlotte For Ever
Charlotte Gainsbourg by Nan Goldin



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