Nan Goldin - Not much of a fan

This blog is going to be all about Nan Goldin.

Nancy Goldin was born in Washington DC on the 12^th of September 1953. She is known for the work she did back when she was a bisexual drug addict that hung around with transsexual and gay people.

Her images aren’t what I call inspiring to me, call me closed minded all you want, but the way I see it, her pictures are just typical snapshots of someones everyday life living with a different crowd. She lived in New York at the time and went to a bar with her friends that was run by the mafia. Her life was surrounded by drugs and alcohol, the excuse ‘it makes us free’ being used as an excuse to using them.

Nans work mostly consisted of her friends and nude people, normally with water in them. She sees straight men difficult to work with emotion wise as they are more reluctant to open up when it comes to their feelings.

She used to have a boyfriend called Brian. He wasn’t a very nice guy, once he read her diary and beat her up because of what he read in it. She was a drug addict around this time and eventually went into rehab, where she took pictures of herself in the mirror.

One thing I do like about Nans images though, is the way she uses water and mirrors to reflect and question identity. Whilst in rehab, she went through some type of transformation, where she says that whilst there she ‘discovered daylight’. Her life before rehab consisted of going out at night, back in those days transsexual and gay people weren’t accepted by a lot of people, so they kept to themselves in the daytime and stayed indoors for most of it. She took photos of herself in rehab to help her ‘fit into her own skin’ again, it helped her realise who she was and overcome the addiction. She moved back to New York a year and a half later.

Nan never really sets up her images when it comes to taking them, they’re all spur of the moment pictures, taken at that precise moment to capture it in time. Yet, they all give out a strong message and show what the culture was like back then.

The picture below is an image Nan Goldin took of herself shortly after Brian beat her up. It shows how much of an asshole he was to her.

Some critics have accused her of making heroin-use appear glamorous, and of pioneering a grunge style that later became popularized by youth fashion magazines such as The Face and I-D.

However, in a 2002 interview with The Observer, Goldin replied to these comments by using the fashion magazines own advertisments against them.

“I never took pictures of people doing heroin to sell clothes. And I have a bit of a problem with it. Like this Dior campaign right now, where the girl is really dope-sick then she sprays Addiction perfume and suddenly she's high. I find that really reprehensible and evil.”


Information Source - http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2002/jan/06/features.magazine27