Nan Goldin is an American photographer who was born in
Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1953. After her sister’s suicide in 1965, Nan
Goldin took up photography. Her first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was
based on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transsexual
communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong.
Goldin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts
University in 1977/1978. Her works are often presented in the form of
slideshow. The main themes of her early pictures were love, gender,
domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually shot with available light.
She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms
and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and
dependency. Goldin said in a YouTube clip that she went to a school based on
Summerhill, England which is a free school where people were running naked and
at that point she became obsessed with taking pictures.
By 1988, Goldin's drug and alcohol abuse had begun to take a
toll on her life and work, and she entered a detoxification clinic. Though she
had previously experimented with self-portraiture, it was in this clinic that
she created many images of herself. Photographs such as ‘My Bedroom at the Lodge’, ‘Self-portrait
in front of clinic’, and ‘Self-portrait
with milagro’ reveal an introspective Goldin, somewhat humbled by her
experiences at the hospital.
Bibliography
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