Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror

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with Rembrandt and Courbet, we find in Goldin’s œuvre a number of portraits of the artist in the frame with her friends, notably Nan and Brian in Bed (1983) the picture of the artist and Brian , her toxic lover chosen for the cover of The Ballad. However, the basic tenet of the œuvre of Nan Goldin is, I would argue, that even when the artist herself is not represented, most works, and especially those in The Ballad, lean towards the self-portrait. Goldin is representing herself through what she has called her family. In other words, Gina, Gilles, Suzanne, Brian, Dieter, Cookie, Ryan, and Mark, these specific others with whom she identifies are her “tribe” (Armstrong and Keller 454) and are part of herself. The result is that whether a photograph is of Nan or of one or some of her friends, the viewer’s experience is like that of the reader of a verbal autobiography when presented with the significant figures in the author’s life story. The viewer and reader are “privy to the author’s sense of self” and of what constitutes her identity, a sense of oneself performed and often theatricalized by the mirror (Armstrong and Keller 449). Nan believes that this is the ultimate act of autonomous independence. In decades of photography life, Nan is not shooting her transvestites, transgenders, and gay friends, but set up a mirror to faithfully reflect the world. She insists on telling people the truth: physical limitations do not hinder the height of the spirit.

work of Nan Goldin is a dialogue between the self and the other and, in her own words, a “struggle between intimacy and autonomy” (MoCA), an account of how the I can approach the you without losing itself (or, in the Ballad’s terms, without withdrawal symptoms). “Nan Goldin: I’ll be Your Mirror” was the title of an exhibition and a publication in 1996 by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2020 the Collection Lambert in Avignon, which contains a great many of Goldin’s self-portraits, held a show with a similar title that presented a large section devoted to Goldin. The latter exhibition has served in the present article which contends that when Goldin’s photographs reflect specific others, the artist is reflecting herself, and ultimately, the viewer. At 14, afraid she would suffer the same fate as her sister, Goldin ran away from home. She discovered photography while living in foster homes in the Boston area. At school she met David Armstrong, the first person she photographed and the one who started calling her Nan. They moved together into a row house in Boston with four other roommates, and as Armstrong started performing in drag, Goldin became enamored of the drag queens and their lives, seeing them as a “third gender that made more sense that the other two,” as she explained in her 1995 documentary, I’ll Be Your Mirror. She wanted to be a fashion photographer and dreamed of putting the queens on the cover of Vogue.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-10-17 14:12:39 Associated-names Goldin, Nan, 1953-; Armstrong, David, 1954-2014; Holzwarth, Hans Werner; Whitney Museum of American Art Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40737419 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Armstrong, David and Walter Keller. “Conversation”. I’ll Be Your Mirror, New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1996. Ibars, Stéphane. “Entretien avec Yvon Lambert” in Nan Goldin. Trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods. Les Cahiers de la Collection Lambert. Arles : Actes Sud, 2020. Goldin was born in Washington in 1953. Her work began to emerge in the New York of the 1980s, when the artist was in her early thirties. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, the work that founded Goldin’s place in contemporary art (“The thing that sustains my name,” MoCA) began as an ever-changing slide show projected by the artist herself in underground clubs in New York and around the world. Sound was added in 1980 and the work received its name in 1981 from a song in Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera. In 1985, it was reviewed in the Village Voice and presented at the Whitney Biennial; it reached its definitive form, running for 48 minutes with over 700 pictures and with 30 songs, in 1987. That year it was also shown during the Rencontres de la photographie in the Roman theatre in Arles. Goldin’s work began to be exhibited in France in the early 1990s, first by Agnès b. and then by Yvon Lambert whose gallery she joined in 1995. Lambert chose Goldin and other artists working with photography precisely because she was not a photographer, but an artist using photography: “I’ve always supported the work of that generation which called themselves artists, and used photography as one medium among others, by reinventing it. People like Louise Lawler, Andres Serrano…” (Ibars 67).

The work is called “Nan, who was beaten after a month”. I was surprised when I saw this photo for the first time. Although Goldin in the photo reveals awkwardness and the bruises on her face are clearly visible, her eyes are firm, calm, but helpless. This is completely different from the self-portraits I have seen before. In “Visual Diary”, Nan further explored the inequality and instability of the relationship between men and women by showing the relationship and the change of distance between her and her boyfriend Brian. As Nan’s boyfriend and model, Brian beat, insulted Nan and even almost wiped out her eyes. “Visual Diary” is like a silent film that stimulates people’s nerves and records Brian’s abuse of Nan. The picture named “Nan, who was beaten after a month” is the “work” of Brian. urn:oclc:record:1349254867 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier nangoldinillbeyo0000suss Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2rptqthgz9 Invoice 1652 Isbn 0874271029 She vowed never to return to Brian’s side. Later Nan included this photo in “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, this had a big impact at the time. A female photographer calmly faces the camera and records how she has been beaten– what she wants to express is not just introspection, fragility and pain, but the harm caused by the imbalance or even opposition between the two sexes. It can be said that Nan Goldin is a very talented female photographer. Before her, few photographers paid attention to and continued to shoot LGBT groups and related subcultures. Besides, few people realized that LGBT groups have dignity and bottom line. Transgenders and transvestites living on the edge of the city have allowed Nan to see a non-traditional, alternative idealized country: a country that is free to control its own destiny.

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Delvaux, Martine et Jamie Herd. “Comment faire apparaître Écho ? Sœurs, saintes et sibylles de Nan Goldin et Autoportrait en vert de Marie Ndiaye.” Protée, volume 35, number 1, printemps 2007, 29–39. https://doi.org/10.7202/015886ar Web. 3 May. 2023. Reconstructing early-modern religious lives: the exemplary and the mundane / 2. Another Vision of Empire. Henry Rider Haggard’s Modernity and Legacy The United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s was experiencing the emancipation of the mind. Women’s Liberation Movement, Sexual Liberation Movement, Ecstasy Culture, Hippies, and Anti-war Movement, etc, have emerged in the United States. At same time, the hippie culture of the West Coast changed the attitudes and ways of life of young Americans, and in the frenzy of sexual liberation, a large number of LGBT groups began to respond. They abandon the secular ethical constraints, liberate themselves, admire freedom, that deeply attract Nan Goldin, who runs counter to traditional class thinking.