I’ve always beeen a little ambivalent about the work of Nan Goldin, and it seems a totally appropriate reaction. A recently published feature on her on Dangerous Minds is labelled with the topics: Art; Drugs; Queer; Sex; Unorthodox; often I wonder if my own interest in the pictures might be labelled prurient. Not that I would consider them pornographic or abusive (unlike the Gateshead police). But I certainly find her work interesting.
The article, Being human: Sexuality, gender and belonging to family in Nan Goldin’s photography (NSFW) might not be safe for your work, but seems fairly tame for mine and includes a fairly short video of Goldin talking about her life and work. Although she speaks with great candour, and her work has made aspects of her life very public, I sometimes feel she does not entirely admit (perhaps even to herself) the control she exerts in making her images.
Commenting many years ago I wrote about her work “It only offers us glimpses, framed and caught with more or less skill by the person who directs it – and Goldin’s control as a director is remarkable.” Even when she is in bed and using a long cable release to a camera placed earlier on a tripod across the room.
One of the skills that distinguish good photographers of events develop is that of visualising a scene from a different viewpoint. When you may see something happening while you may immediately make an exposure even though you are not in the right position just in case, but the first reaction is to think where your camera should be to best photograph the scene, and to try to get there. If the camera is fixed and you are in a different position, choosing the right moment to press the release is not largely a matter of chance but again of visualisation. And of course after the event editing, selecting the images that work best.
I first wrote about her after seeing her work in the book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, (you can see a 42 minute video version to a soundtrack by The Tiger Lilies on Vimeo, but it seems incredibly slow moving compared to her slide show which I saw – and there are various other shorter versions on YouTube) which she described as “the diary I let people read” and revised the piece as Nan Goldin’s Mirror on Life in 2002 after seeing her work at the Whitechapel Gallery, and again in 2007 to put on this site.
Nan Goldins Mirror on Life