So when she was fourteen, she chose to escape from the home, where was rigid, stubborn, false and serious, to formed a new “Utopia family” with a group of young people who lived on the edge of society and loved the hippie culture. Most of these young people are artists and writers who despised traditional bourgeois life, indulged in alcohol, drugs and sex. They never live for others. Lejeune, Philippe, Catherine Bogaert. Le journal intime : histoire et anthologie. Paris : Textuel, 2006.

left: Nan Goldin, “Jimmy Paulette and Tabboo in the Bathroom, NYC, 1991” right: Diane Arbus, “A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966” Few photographers can boast a body of work as deep and uncompromisingly honest as that of Nan Goldin. Internationally renowned for her documentation of love, fluid sexuality, glamour, beauty, death, intoxication and pain, Goldin’s photographs feature her life and those in it. Her visual language and “social portraiture” approach not only rejects the conventional limits of the medium of photography, it creates something unique: a mirror of herself, as well as the world. In “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, Nan also preserved her many years of memories: the death of family and friends, the breakdown of relationship, the gathering of friends, and Naomi wearing a gorgeous dance dress with laughing. . Through these photos, Nan not only reveals the fragile and sensitive side of human nature, but also expresses the relationship between desire and loss, joy and sorrow, sex and lovelorn, which seemingly contradictory but symbiotic coexists. She first wants to prove is the universal theme of human destruction: the inevitable collapse of love relationships, the indulgence of desires, the loss of loved ones and friends, and the illusion of escape from reality.In the photo, her transvestite friends, determined, calm, and unduly to show their beautiful posture, this is the Nan’s early photography, which reflects the characteristics of the traditional documentary photography at that time: the photographer and the model are two individuals. They are only indifferent in their own space, with relationship but does not intimate. Moreover, the photographer records the life and state of the model, but can’t describe the essence behind the photo.

Although Nan Goldin has a wealthy family, she did not have a happy childhood. At the age of eleven, her sister committed suicide in the rails, which is undoubtedly a fatal blow to Nan Goldin. Nan once said in an interview: “Everyone is always careful about everything around him. It is an environment that corrects all untimely things. For example, the matter of suicide by my sister is also said to be a cause.” The United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s was experiencing the emancipation of the mind. Women’s Liberation Movement, Sexual Liberation Movement, Ecstasy Culture, Hippies, and Anti-war Movement, etc, have emerged in the United States. At same time, the hippie culture of the West Coast changed the attitudes and ways of life of young Americans, and in the frenzy of sexual liberation, a large number of LGBT groups began to respond. They abandon the secular ethical constraints, liberate themselves, admire freedom, that deeply attract Nan Goldin, who runs counter to traditional class thinking.Sartorius, Joachim. “Deep Pictures of Us All”. I’ll Be Your Mirror. New York : Whitney Museum of Art, 1996. urn:oclc:record:1349254867 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier nangoldinillbeyo0000suss Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2rptqthgz9 Invoice 1652 Isbn 0874271029 Le discours rapporté et l’expression de la subjectivité / 2.Modernist Non-fictional Narratives of War and Peace (1914-1950)

why, we might wonder, does Goldin prefer her visual diary, why is this public while her written one is private? The reason is surely that the photograph is indexical; it says “this was here” and “this cannot be denied.” Of course, we are talking about photography of the pre-digital age and of a pre-Photoshop time when Barthes could write in La chambre claire that “for certain The Photograph says what has been” ( Camera Lucida 85). It is for this “unmediated” truth that Goldin feels photographs not only record what happened, but also trigger memory in a way that, for her, writing does not (Goldin 6). She is talking here about the way the photograph interacts with memory for the photographer and the sitter, but she may also be suggesting that it provokes a stronger emotion too for a viewer who is not directly involved in the scene of the snapshot. At 14, afraid she would suffer the same fate as her sister, Goldin ran away from home. She discovered photography while living in foster homes in the Boston area. At school she met David Armstrong, the first person she photographed and the one who started calling her Nan. They moved together into a row house in Boston with four other roommates, and as Armstrong started performing in drag, Goldin became enamored of the drag queens and their lives, seeing them as a “third gender that made more sense that the other two,” as she explained in her 1995 documentary, I’ll Be Your Mirror. She wanted to be a fashion photographer and dreamed of putting the queens on the cover of Vogue. At first, Nan used an imaging camera sent to her by school and she only took pictures from ordinary life. Everything changed on 1972, when she first met Ivey, Naomi and Klett in the suburbs of Boston. Nan couldn’t hold on to joy when she focused on the three transvestites through the lens, she found her curiosity and affection for the beauty of gender blur, she likes them, she wants to be friends with them and shoots for them.

P.A.I.N.

When we think of Goldin’s love and understanding of queer subculture, she presents the articulation of drag as a form of authentic self-expression. Jimmy Paulette is not quite dressed yet, but he is in a state of becoming. He is not vulnerable. He is relaxed and confident. have examined the ways Goldin’s photographic work is a portrait of the self: first in the literal self-portraits, then in the portraits of self and friends in the same frame, and more largely in the “family portraits.” I will now explore how the construction of Goldin’s work is akin to verbal autobiography. For this, I would like to make use of an idea formulated by Eric Marty while editing Roland Barthes. For Barthes, Marty tells us, thinking is anchored not so much in concepts, but in the rhythm of writing: “Le vrai lieu où la pensée vibre, pour lui, ce n'est pas le concept, mais la phrase rythmée” (Birnbaum, np). II. Le vrai lieu où la pensée vibre Coellier Sylvie, dir. Des émotions dans les arts aujourd’hui. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2015. Just as Goldin’s career was taking off, she fell deeper and deeper into drug addiction. “The party was over but I couldn’t stop,” she said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. “I stayed shut up in my loft snorting drugs, going months without seeing daylight.” She entered a rehab clinic outside Boston and got sober in 1988. When she returned to New York, she found that many of her friends had contracted AIDS. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Ballad would take on new meaning as a portrayal of a closeknit queer community right before the wave of destruction that was the AIDS epidemic. “I used to think I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost,” Goldin said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. “It wasn’t until the first year of my sobriety that I confronted the reality as I watched a number of my friends die. I photographed some of them while they were ill to try to keep them alive and to leave traces of their lives. It was then I realized how little photography could preserve.”

In 2022, Goldin was awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize for her contributions to contemporary photography. A retrospective exhibition, “This Will Not End Well,” is touring European museums for the next couple of years, with an accompanying book coming in 2023. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the new documentary directed by Laura Poitras, covers Goldin’s life and work, with a focus on her P.A.I.N. activism. It won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival. In the 1990s, as The Ballad slideshow toured museums worldwide, Goldin gathered her photos of Mueller and created a portfolio and exhibition dedicated to her. She started photographing empty rooms, landscapes, and skylines. She collected a decade’s worth of her photographs of drag queens for a book and exhibition titled The Other Side. She and Armstrong created a two-person show and accompanying book called A Double Life. In 1994 she collaborated with Nobuyoshi Araki on Tokyo Love, a project photographing young people in Tokyo’s underground cultures. In 1996, her mid-career retrospective, I’ll Be Your Mirror, opened at the Whitney before touring Europe.In 1989 Goldin curated the first art exhibition in New York about AIDS, “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.” Mounted at Artists Space, it included work by Armstrong, diCorcia, Lankton, Morrisroe, Peter Hujar, Vittorio Scarpati, Kiki Smith, and David Wojnarowicz. “I am often filled with rage at my sense of powerlessness in the face of this plague,” Goldin wrote in one of the show catalogue’s essays. “I want to empower others by providing them a forum to voice their grief and anger in the hope that this public ritual of mourning can be cathartic in the process of recovery, both for those among us who are ill and those survivors who are left behind.” Lccn 96017659 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.6404 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-0000368 Openlibrary_edition In her photos, everything is real and there are no fictional elements. “I don’t like the forged world, we need the real world, so we need photography as evidence to tell us the truth,” Golding said. Including our parents, the mass media has nurtured us, made us social, gave us entertainment, comforted us, it deceived us, and bound us, telling us what to do, what should not to do. In the process of transforming us from a woman of personality to the same person, it plays the most critical role: through American printing presses, projectors and TV channels, it shapes us into traditionally good women and bad women. For the female concept, these are already the most important legacy of the public media: put all the neatness into one. ”