Nan Goldin is an American Fine Art and
Documentary Photographer. She was born on September 12 in 1953, in Washington, D.C and grew up in a upper - middle class Jewish family in Boston.
Goldin’s photos explores love and compassion that are based in a very harsh genre, mostly includes herself - portrait and her family and friends. At the first she started taking photos in black and white film then she moved on to colour film; the best known works are sexual and violent like sexual problems and drug addicts and drag
queens which together reflects her life, with that it contains a very severe images that I founded very impressive.
At the age 14, in 1965 Nan Goldin’s older sister Barbara Goldin committed a suicide that had effected Nan for the rest of her life. Thereafter she frequented a school called Satya Community School, where she met David Armstrong and Suzanne Fletcher, who comforted her and became the focal subject of her life by photographing them, which the idea was to record the present a way to perserve the present as the memories of her sister was fading away. Also through them, she manage to reside and photographed a drag subculture in a nightclub called ‘The Other Side’, where her obsesses to genres start to meet because she founded drag queens the most beautiful people she ever seen.
The second photo is a Goldin’s self-portrait printed in Cibachrome, taken in 1984 one month after she being violated abused, she was battered by her ex - partner Brian so badly that she almost lost her eyesight; and she had frozen that moment to show aspects of her life just as realistic and natural as the immaculate scenes of nature.
What cough my eyes in Goldin’s work-life is the fact that she had a rough life and she expresses that by taking photographs creating a documentary about what she has gone through and around her surroundings which has influenced generations because she sees things from inside and uses the camera as a visual diary, a point to communicate with the viewers.
A comment that Nan Goldin made in her photographic style that I founded very interesting because it truly interprets and clarifies to her work - life: “ A lot of people seem to think that art or photography is about the way things look or the surface of things. That’s not what it’s about for me. It’s really about relationship and feelings.”
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z3sihEuiEk
- Books: Ballad of Sexual Dependency, I'll Be Your Mirror, The Other Side and The Devil's Playground.
