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Nan Goldin,
Roommate with teacup, Boston,
1973.
Gelatin-silver print, 19 7/8 x 15 7/8 inches.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee and with funds contributed by the International Director's Council and Executive Committee Members: Ruth Baum, Edythe Broad, Elaine Terner Cooper, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Harry David, Gail May.
2002.65.
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Since the late 1960s, Nan Goldin has worked on an evolving body of work that builds upon the informal, content-driven aesthetic of the snapshot. Like Diane Arbus and Mary Ellen Mark, she works loosely within the documentary tradition; unlike these two, however, Goldin has developed an ongoing first-person account of life among the friends, lovers, and acquaintances who make up what she has called her “re-created family.” Goldin's photographs invite the viewer inside the private dramas of people and situations normally considered to be on the outer reaches of social acceptability—from a scene of drag queens backstage to one of postcoital dejection, from a lackluster moment at a dinner party to a transvestite's toilette.
The emotional states of Goldin's subjects are visually intensified by her focus on interior spaces, lush color, and theatrical lighting. Most striking of all, perhaps, is her photographs' sense of intimacy and informality. Her subjects appear not as objects of a distant, voyeuristic gaze, but as friends grown used to the camera's inevitable presence. For example, Greer and Robert on the bed, NYC (1982)—one of several hundred images comprising Goldin's slide show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980–86), which documents the gender-bending, substance-abusing, club-going culture of New York's downtown scene—captures the frightening fragility of an uncertain relationship.
Ivy with Marilyn, Boston (1973)—part of a compilation of photographs titled The Other Side: 1972–1992, published in 1993—is from an early black-and-white body of work depicting the drag queens with whom Goldin lived and socialized. These photographs of the “third sex” suggest that in the universal struggle between autonomy and dependency, the greatest autonomy may come from disavowing the gender roles that complicate this struggle. Her more recent projects take up different themes, such as pregnancy and motherhood in From Here to Maternity (1986–2000) and the struggles of a life lived under the shadow of AIDS in POSITIVE (1993–2000). Yet these photographs continue Goldin's investigation into human relations that, like sex, revolve around negotiating simultaneous desires for togetherness and separation, community and independence.
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