“The phoenix condition is a dilemma that is induced by trauma. The person operating under its influence must find absolute zero in order to rebuild and rejuvenate oneself against the grain that death provides”
‘My work has always come from empathy and love’ says American photographer Nan Goldin. Goldin began taking photographs as a teenager in Boston, Massachusetts. Her earliest works, black-and-white images of drag queens, were celebrations of the subcultural lifestyle of the community to which she belonged and which she continued to document throughout the 1990s. During […]
American photographer. Goldin began taking photographs as a teenager in Boston, MA. During a period of study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she began displaying her work in the format of a slide-show, an evolving project that would be called The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 1981. […]
Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, 1983 “I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough.” (Nan Goldin) By Mihaela Precup Long before ACT UP started rewriting the sick bodies of AIDS patients as vital, strong, and fighting back, photographer Nan Goldin thought she saw an ill omen in the underground New York […]
“AIDS changed everything in my life. There’s life before AIDS, and after AIDS.” By Nan Goldin, for The Digital Journalist, 20 Years: Aids & Photography, 2001, brought to ASX in partnership with The Digital Journalist AIDS changed everything in my life. There’s life before AIDS, and after AIDS. We were in Fire Island that […]
Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC, 1991 “People commonly think of the photographer as a voyeur, but this is my party, I’m not crashing.” Excerpt from, Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative, University of Mexico Press, 2003 By Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble The work of the American artist Nan Goldin, […]
Nan Goldin on Jean-Christian Bourcart (2002) Nan Goldin, Paris, April, 2002 I first saw Jean-Christian Bourcart’s photos ten years ago in the home of my former dealer Gilles Dusein, in his little apartment on rue du Repos overlooking Père Lachaise. Gilles, whose ashes are now dispersed in the famous cemetery, had just begun to represent […]