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In this written series “Women Who Metamorphosed Art: ” I want to deep dive into selected female artists who contributed to art history but are rarely renowned for doing so. As education and media often highlights the contributions of male artists and their works it’s time to educate ourselves on the equal importance of female artists as well. So, the focus of this week’s article is Nan Goldin - who revolutionised photography.
Nan Goldin is a Jewish-American artist born in 1953 and still resides in New York where she spent the majority of her career. She moved to Boston at the age of fourteen to attend Art School but was exposed to an entirely different world than that she knew. She became a member of the New York LGBTQ+ scene and hardcore art group very quickly, which subsequently became the subject of her photography. Nan Goldin took pictures in a less conventional sense to other art photographers of time by which she took photographs of the everyday scenes she saw and people she encountered. Thus, her work was not accepted into high art establishments until much later in her career when people began to see the power of her daily life, further establishing everyday photography as an artform.
Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC, 1991, Nan Goldin, via Tate, London. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/goldin-misty-and-jimmy-paulette-in-a-taxi-nyc-p78046
Goldin’s images reveal more than the average photo diary, it reveals the suppressed world that media did not want to cover or often stigmatised. Her images frame the ordinary lives of drag queens, the prevalence of the AIDs crisis, the effects and trivialities of drug addicts, and the lives of people who were made to feel ostracised to the rest of the world. But the fact that Goldin was there taking pictures of these people in their daily context cast a sense of ordinary over their lives and showed to the rest of the world these were just people like anyone else. Therefore, her images have been noted as acts of advocacy and awareness that typical media was avoiding and showing the importance of discussing such issues to take away the stigma.
In terms of media, Goldin was an avid film camera user which adds so much more power to her images as we know that they are a one time capture. Film photography ensures that the image taken is authentic and encapsulates one, often unreproducible, moment. Therefore her photos truly document scenes that we would never be able to otherwise see and take the idea of a candid photo to the next level.
One of my favourite works by Goldin is Cookie and Vittorio’s wedding, New York City, and depicts two of her close friends in a candid moment of their wedding. Cookie and Vittorio both soon passed away from AIDs but the pictures which Goldin took of them keeps them alive. The beauty of this image is it captures a moment of complete joy and shows a couple affected by AIDs simply enjoying and living their lives, which is not how the media framed people with AIDs. This artwork therefore serves as a key example of how Goldin destigmatized certain topics and instead captured the beautiful moments in them.
Cookie and Vittorio’s wedding, New York City, 1986, Nan Goldin, via MOCA, Los Angeles.
The reason I bring up Nan Goldin’s work this week is because I’ve been thinking a lot about social media and the ways we essentially create our own photo diaries of the things we do and the people we love. So, without realising we all in a way emanate Nan Goldin’s work and objective and that shows just how she eternalised the daily photograph and normalised the documentation of the unseen.
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