CHILDREN are the focus of Nan Goldin’s book – her first in 11
years. While such a tender subject matter may seem a surprising
choice, given her previously controversial and candid work,
children remind her of her first muses – drag queens.
“They’re both malleable and they reinvent themselves a lot,” she
says. “To me, queens are the bravest people on earth. With
children, society starts destroying them quickly, but before
they’re four or five they have their own worlds. I have this idea
that children come from another planet; they remember that place at
first then they forget it. This book shows children as autonomous
beings; it’s not about children as invented by adults, not about
behaving in ways that were prescribed to them. It’s a narrative
book, almost like sci-fi or a Grimm’s fairytale.”
Goldin pioneered the diary-style photography that we know today;
you could say she even inadvertently pioneered an early form of
Instagram (not that she’d want to be associated with that, she
doesn’t know what it is nor does she want to), in her early work in
which she recorded her drug-fuelled, depraved and hedonistic
lifestyle in Eighties New York. In a famous work, The Ballad of
Sexual Dependency (originally a slide show which was later
made into a book) she captured her candid adventures with friends,
drag queens, addicts, transvestites and prostitutes. She’s
known for being notoriously prickly, volatile even, but when we
meet at a London hotel, she is open, warm and full of anecdotes and
our interview extends way beyond the agreed 30
minutes. Although still as impassioned about her work and
uncensored as ever, she seems content.Â
“My friends were so glamorous and beautiful – I never felt
marginalised,” she says. “We didn’t want to be like straight
people. We had a tribe. Everyone says that I photographed
marginalised people, well marginalised from whom? We were our own
tribe, we didn’t care.”
Goldin’s own childhood wasn’t easy. She grew up in a
suburb of Boston with middle-class parents. The youngest of four,
she had a difficult relationship with her parents but was close to
her sister, Barbara, who committed suicide, aged 19, when lay down
on the tracks before a commuter train. Goldin was then only
11.Â
Goldin’s own childhood wasn’t easy. She grew up in a
suburb of Boston with middle-class parents. The youngest of four,
she had a difficult relationship with her parents but was close to
her sister, Barbara, who committed suicide, aged 19, when lay down
on the tracks before a commuter train. Goldin was then only
11.Â
She describes school as “gruesome” and was expelled from various
institutions, mostly for selling weed. Though her peers saw her as
an outsider, she wasn’t bothered by her reputation: “I’m proud to
say that I’ve been bizarre all my life. I never wanted to be
normal.”
Goldin finally escaped Boston to meet her “tribe” in New York as
a young woman where she became firmly ensconced in the drug scene.
Having created The Ballad, she then spent two years in her
bedroom taking drugs while the New York art scene praised her work.
When her boyfriend at the time beat her – she took pictures of her
bruised face which went on to become one of her most famous images.
She described the aftermath as a “horror show”: on entering rehab
doctors forbade her from using her camera for two months.
“It was more difficult coming off my camera than my drugs; I had
been taking pictures since I was 15,” she says. “Everyone thought
when I stopped taking drugs that I wouldn’t create anything good.
It was difficult to find inspiration without them at first. People
are so voyeuristic and vicarious about that it’s
amazing: Jean-Michel Basquiat is a perfect example of
that. The art world pushed him to take drugs, but when he stopped
taking them everyone criticised his work so he went back to drugs
 - and he died. When I got clean, everyone thought I’d be
boring – the same people who were furious when I was an addict
doubted that I’d be able to produce anything good without
them.”
It took time, but she managed to get clean and produce new work,
primarily slide shows (“They’re films that I can constantly
re-edit”), with a few commercial works thrown in for good measure.
She likes fashion and has shot for Vogue before – it was
through fashion, after all, that she first became aware of
photography. Despite having a reputation for being difficult and
short-tempered, age seems to have calmed her – although she isn’t
pleased with the evolution of digital photography.
“The world has become so horrible,” she says. “I’ve lost my
medium. I’m no longer able to make slide shows, everything’s
scanned – it’s digital. I don’t understand what the fuck that is.
People have more control over my work than I do. They go on the
computer and do all this stuff and I don’t know how to do it. It
would be like being a Renaissance painter and not having any oil
paints. The world is so oversaturated and everyone has an attention
span of less than a second. It’s not the world I thought would
happen.”
As new book makes clear, Goldin has lost none of her integrity.
Her style of work may have been replicated countlessly, without any
credit, and she claims not to have any money because she “always
seems to give her work away”, but Eden and After is as
honest as anything she has ever done – albeit with a more tender
edge. Although she never wanted her own children until she was 40,
and “by then it was too late”, she recognises something in her
untainted, wild and agenda-free young subjects.
“When I take a really good picture, it’s like a high – this
moment of euphoria. But the best of my work is about empathy,
trying to feel what it is to be in another person’s body; to break
that glass. I don’t think any of us understand the other person
well enough. Or maybe that’s just me. I’d always like to know what
it is to be inside other people.”
Eden and After is available to buy here.
Nan Goldin Finds Her Eden
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