Monday 31 March 2014

Nan Goldin Finds Her Eden


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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. 



“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. 



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. 


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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