'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, p*rn*gr*phy 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 p*rn*gr*ph*c pictures of young girls. I was shocked. I never took p*rn*gr*phy. I hate p*rn*gr*phy. 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 p*rn*gr*phy, and I always found it distressing and based on contempt. To me, p*rn*gr*phy is all about money. That's the difference between p*rn*gr*phy 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".
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.
