Week 2 Photographer

NAN GOLDIN

In class, a fellow classmate presented his journal article which explained the work about Nan Goldin. I had never heard of her work before, but was intrigued by her images and wanted to further research her and her images for myself.

Nan Goldin is a contemporary American photographer, who's work became known in the 1980s. Her work was described as intimate, gritty and quite busy and chaotic. Goldin would take images in any situation, taking images of intimate moments in her community, to taking self portraits of herself after she had been abused. Goldin turned photography of everyday people, parties, sexual moments and private events into a matter worthy of attention. Her most famous body of work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has become an invaluable record of a creative community soon to be torn apart by the AIDS crisis - with many of the artist's photographs now haunting memorials of friends and lovers lost to the disease.

Ryan in the tub (1976)

When researching further, it was argued that although Goldin is famous for gritty, "in the moment" photographs, a lot of her portraits are carefully posed. Goldin focuses on “the gaze” of her subjects. This is touched upon in Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger describes various ways that people in images look at each other, and at the viewer, as a way to read power dynamics in painting and popular culture, stating that women are presented to be looked at, while men do the looking. Goldin's photographs upheave these traditional representations, by inviting viewers to share her erotic gaze towards a naked man, or staring straight out at the viewer confrontationally. Her photographs are extremely important challenges to traditional power relations as they are played out in images in art and everyday life.

Self-portrait in my Blue Bathroom, Berlin (1991)

This image was a later self-portrait, Goldin photographs herself in the bathroom. Serving as a backdrop, which is multiplied in the bathroom mirror's reflection, the blue tiles take up most of the image. The geometric shapes are only broken up by Goldin's face sitting in the bottom corner of the mirror. She looks off and out of the frame.

The blue tiles overpower the portrait, engulfing Goldin's disembodied, hovering head. Goldin often photographed people, especially women and young girls, in bathroom mirrors. The artists use of mirrors again plays with expectations of the gaze between photographer, photographic subject, and viewer: here photographer and subject are the same woman, and it's hard to tell if she is looking at herself or something else. As viewers we are not acknowledged, however the subject knows we are watching her.

The bathroom is a place usually associated with privacy, where people, and especially women, and queer people can be both comfortable and safe, while also being a space they can transform themselves into the type of person they want to present to the world or, alternately, the person the world demands them to be. Bringing the camera into the bathroom reinforces Goldin's interest in addressing the unspoken or hidden private moments that build up into identities, appearances, and selves.

Hidden,
the gaze,
staged but natural
images in the moment