initial research
Nancy Goldin is an American photographer. Her work often explores LGBT bodies, moments of intimacy, the HIV crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which documents the post-Stonewall gay subculture and Goldin's family and friends. She lives and works in New York City, Berlin, and Paris. Goldin's first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was based on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transgender communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong. While living in downtown Boston at age 18, Goldin actually "fell in love with the drag queens," living with them and photographing them. Unlike some photographers who were interested in psychoanalysing or exposing the queens, Goldin admired and respected their sexuality. Goldin said, "My desire was to show them as a third gender, as another sexual option, a gender option. And to show them with a lot of respect and love, to kind of glorify them because I really admire people who can recreate themselves and manifest their fantasies publicly. I think its brave" this here shows Goldin’s determination to portray these queens in her photos as we knows he had a great passion for it and admired them greatly. Goldin describes her life as being completely immersed in the queens'. However, upon attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, when her professors told her to go back and photograph queens again, Goldin admitted her work was not the same as when she had lived with them. Goldin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1977/1978, where she had worked mostly with Cibachrome prints. Her work from this period is associated with the Boston School of Photography. Following graduation, Goldin moved to New York City. She began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the cities vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the hard-drug subculture of the Bowery neighbourhood; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Later published as a book with help from Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn, and Suzanne Fletcher, these snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. In her foreword to the book she describes it as a "diary [she] lets people read" of people she referred to as her "tribe". Part of Ballad was driven by the need to remember her extended family. Photography was a way for her to hold onto her friends, she hoped. The photographs show a transition through Goldin's travels and her life. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug overdose or AIDS; this tally included close friends and often photographed subjects Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. In 2003, The New York Times nodded to the work's impact, explaining Goldin had "forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last twenty years." In addition to Ballad, she combined her Bowery pictures in two other series: I'll Be Your Mirror (from a song by The Velvet Underground) and All By Myself. Goldin's work is most often presented in the form of a slideshow, and has been shown at film festivals; her most famous being a 45-minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. The images are viewed like a private journal made public. In the book Auto-Focus, her photographs are described as a way to "learn the stories and intimate details of those closest to her". It speaks of her uncompromising manner and style when photographing acts such as drug use, sex, violence, arguments, and travelling. It references one of Goldin's notable photographs "Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984" as an iconic image which she uses to reclaim her identity and her life.
Goldin photographed a group of her friends preparing for the New York City Pride March. This picture was taken in a cab as they headed uptown to join their float. Since the 1970’s Goldin has photographed many drag queens and transsexual friends that she has been close to. She sees the work as an homage to their beauty and courage. Goldin has said that ‘the people in these pictures are truly revolutionary. They are the real winners of the battle of the sexes because they have stepped out of the ring.’ This is a large colour photograph of two drag queens known as Misty and Jimmy Paulette. Goldin has photographed them close-up, sitting next to each other inside a taxi. They are framed against the taxi's rear and side windows, through which other yellow New York taxis are visible. The drag queens stare directly at Goldin's camera, aimed at them from the taxi's front seat. They are cropped just below breast level. The camera's flash has illuminated and accentuated their heavy makeup and shiny clothes. Misty wears a light blue wig, big heart-shaped silver earrings and a PVC-textured sleeveless top stretched tight over large fake breasts. Jimmy Paulette's costume includes a streaked blonde wig, a white stretchy-net top and a gold bra, the straps of which have fallen off his shoulders. White padding visible in one of the bra cups and two large holes in the front of the white net confer a sleazy edge to this glamour. Goldin first encountered drag queens in 1972 and quickly became obsessed. She explained... "I was eighteen and felt like I was a queen too they became my whole world. Part of my worship of them involved photographing them. I wanted to pay homage, to show them how beautiful they were. I never saw them as men dressing up as women, but as something entirely different - a third gender that made more sense than either of the other two. I accepted them as they saw themselves; I had no desire to unmask them with my camera".
i think the context behind Goldin's work is great and the way she executes it is amazing, however the reason i have been looking at her work is more for the technical elements and aesthetics. although she does document her experiences in way, they are not as similar as mine or the way i want to do it. one thing i like is her saturated images, and how the vibrant reds and blues contrast with some of the more plain colours in the background. i like how she plays around with distance, which is something i wanted to consider for one of my next shoots as, i usually stick to making the same kind of photographs, as you can see in some of the images above there are images which are more like medium shots however there are some that are extremely close up and some long shots also.
this image here is more of a long, wide angle shot, where you can see everything happening within the scene. it looks like some friends having a small picnic , however the way she has captured the facial expressions where they seem to be smiling and laughing is interesting. as there is one person who isn't facing the camera, we cannot see her emotions. this is why i think it is important to consider these things because if every person in this photo was facing away there isn't much that can tell us they are having a good time. the way i want this to influence my work would be when i am taking pictures of someone and actually focus on there emotions and expressions rather than just capture the back of their head. you can see that Goldin has done this purposely as she is trying to document the way she and her friends like to live and do things.
