Create Curate Culture

It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction ~ Pablo Picasso

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The Nu Project is a series of honest nudes of women from all over the world. The project began in 2005 and has stayed true to the original vision: no professional models, minimal makeup and no glamour. The focus of the project has been and continues to be the subjects and their personalities, spaces, insecurities and quirks.

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In Her Words: Photographing Friends and Lovers.

'The work has always been misunderstood as being about a certain milieu of drugs and parties and the underground. And although I would say that my family still is marginal and we don't want to be part of normal society, I don't think the work was ever about that. I think the work has always been about the condition of being human and the pain, the ability to survive and how difficult that is' (Goldin, 2000).

From Contacts Vol. 2, Portraits of Contemporary Photographers.

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Live Through This: Nan Goldin in Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography.

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The Preservation of Memories

‘Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts’ (Sontag, 1977: 51).

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was dedicated to Goldin’s sister Barbara who committed suicide at the age of eighteen in 1965. This tragedy ignited Goldins interest to photograph the people around her preserving their memory, not staged and professional portraits but photographs documenting their lives intimately but also mundanely with a naturalism that can only convey the truth. It is reasonable to suggest that the photography of Goldin has become a cathartic vehicle for the manifestation of her own grief and her lifelong experience with bereavement, not only in the case of her sister’s death but also the passing of many close friends from AIDS throughout the 1980’s.

Guido Costa describes this awakening of Goldin’s desire to document the truth as ‘a voracious appetite for the truth, no matter what, and her disregard for the fact that what is true can also be uncomfortable, tiresome, compromising. She was engaged in a struggle against everything and everyone, but especially against the lies and materialism of that era, which she perceived as the darkness within America’s soul, the nightmare that lay behind the dream’.  

Within the imagery of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency we are introduced to many significant characters from Goldin’s life between 1979-1986, encompassing friends and muses, lovers and an abuser. Some of these individuals were further documented by Goldin after the publication of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; these images influenced further collections of photographs, introspective explorations of certain friends as in The Cookie Portfolio; a collection of photographs gathered by Goldin of her friend and muse, the actress Cookie Mueller from 1976 to Mueller’s death from AIDS 1989.

Invoking the theories of Susan Sontag in her essay ‘Melancholy Objects’, one can consider the cathartic process Goldin employs of photographing the people she loves, as Sontag suggests

‘Photography is an inventory of mortality. A touch of the finger now suffices to invest a moment with posthumous irony. Photographs show people being so irrefutably there and at a specific age in their lives; group together people and things which a moment later have already disbanded, changed and continued along the course of their independent destinies’ (Sontag, 1977: 70).

The Cookie Portfolio illustrates a visceral and intimate documentation of Goldin’s friendship with Mueller, in the hedonistic New York of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s to photographs of Cookie in the last months of her life attending the funeral of her husband Vittorio Scarpati in 1989 before Mueller's death which Goldin also documented.

Goldin captures and preserves her memories of Cookie encapsulating both moments of intense happiness and sadness, there is no difference for Goldin between weddings and funerals, and they are life events worthy of documentation. As Sontag would further argue

 ‘Photography has always been fascinated by social heights and lower depths’ (Sontag, 1977: 55).

I was told many years ago, there are no rules to grief and this fact I accepted. It is not until I lost someone so significant that the truth of this statement resonated deeply. As the turbulent journey of bereavement began as the stages of grief consumed me individually and collectively. Even now I sometimes sit, tremulous with tears. Emotional polarities differentiate these moments from peaceful, reflective grief to bitter, angry, frustrated grief but each experience occurs with his photograph held in his hand. I do not despise either of my reactions, the emotion expressed informs me my love is still there, his love is still there and death does not divide that. A comforting yet intimate viscerality emerges from the photo and I become absorbed in this memory, the hue of his skin, the fine yarn of his violet cashmere sweater, his hands in his pockets, concentrating on the painting before him. It is not only the memory that emerges from the photograph, it is also the memory ingrained in my mind. I remember where I stood as I took that photo, behind him, observing his interest, his gaze captivated by Ben Johnson’s Liverpool Cityscape, in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, on a snowy New Year’s Eve in 2009. Three years later, the violet cashmere sweater is folded delicately in my drawer, the photograph as always fixed by my bedside, a bottle of the cologne he wore nestled behind it.

 ‘We all tell stories which are versions of history – memorized, encapsulated, repeatable, and safe. Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the colour, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density of life. Memory allows an endless flow of connections. Stories can be rewritten, memory can’t. If each picture is a story, then the accumulation of these pictures comes closer to the experience of memory, a story without an end’ (Goldin, 1986: 6).

Bibliography

Costa, G., 2001. Nan Goldin, London: Phaidon Press.

Goldin, N., 2006. 20 Years: Aids and Photography. [Online] The Digital Journalist. Available at: http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0106/voices_goldin.htm [Accessed 21 January 2012].

Goldin, N., 1986. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, New York: Aperture.

Sontag, S., 1977. On Photography, London: Penguin Books.

Sontag

The effectiveness of photography’s statement of loss depends on its steadily enlarging the familiar iconography of mystery, mortality and transience (Sontag, 1977: 67).

Photography is an inventory of mortality. A touch of the finger now suffices to invest a moment with posthumous irony. Photographs show people being so irrefutably there and at a specific age in their lives; group together people and things which a moment later have already disbanded, changed and continued along the course of their independent destinies (Sontag, 1977: 70).

Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people (Sontag, 1997: 70).

 As the fascination that photographs exercise a reminder of death, it is also an invitation to sentimentality. Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgements by the generalized pathos of looking at times past (Sontag, 1977: 71).

Books of photography, pile higher and higher – measuring the lost past, taking the temperature of the present. Photographs furnish instant history, instant sociology, instant participation. But there is something remarkably anodyne about these new forms of packaging reality (Sontag, 1977: 75).

  Further Reading

Allen, G., 2003. Roland Bathes: Routledge Critical Thinkers, London: Routledge.

Barthes, R., 1980. Camera Lucida, London:Vintage.

Hallas, R., 2009. Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image, Durham: Duke University Press.

Sontag, S., 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin Books.

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Weaving Narratives in Museum Galleries.

Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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What lies within?

In the documentary ‘In My Life’ Nan Goldin describes her photographs as possessing a documentary aesthetic, and claims that her early photographs were influenced by a cinema rather than photography, and this can be seen as one examines the images exhibited within The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and as the publication’s title suggests it is not merely a photo album, it portrays a ballad, a narrative trajectory unfolds from page to page, each image akin to a film still illuminated by a colour saturated palette. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency documents a sense of performativity capturing Goldin’s life, the images become alive and become the site of intersubjective engagement between the artist, the subject and the observer. Ruddy further examines this documentation, describing it as an

'emotional acuity, made up of and structured by Goldin's own intersections with the histories of other people, her love for them, and her inevitable loss of them. Goldin sometimes sees that loss long before it happens, and as such it registers as part of her own lived history' (Ruddy, 2009: 349).

It can be suggested that Goldin's own work follows a methodology of autoethnography, her photographic intent is intrinsic to her character, Goldin comments that

 ‘People in the pictures say my camera is as much a part of being with me as any other aspect of knowing me. It’s as if my hand were a camera. If it were possible, I’d want no mechanism between me and the moment of photographing. The camera is much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex. The instant of photographing, instead of creating distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection for me. There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one to be invited to the party. But I am not crashing; this is my party. This is family, my history’ (Goldin, 1986: 6). 

With a developing curatorial insight I can sit here this afternoon browsing through these images of Goldin’s life, invoking my own memories, cathartically recalling the awakening of my own sexuality, friendships, past relationships, abusive experiences and periods of grief. I wish I had documented these experiences and faces as their clarity diminishes from my memory, so I could reflect on the intensity and contradictions of those emotions that occurred at the time: my own history, as Hamilton discusses the documentary objectivity of photography  

‘far from being a mere recitation of visual facts, social documentary turns out to be a mode of representation deeply coloured by ambiguities, and generally representative of the paradigm in which it has been constructed’ (Hamilton, 1997).

I begin to see themes of representation occurring as the pages are turned, these images are not flat one-dimensional pictorial depictions, individually and almost cinematically a story unfolds a colourful mise-en-scene of Goldin’s life enriched by a narrative of experience and memory. I wish to look deeper, examine the pictures more intimately and understand the narratives Goldin depicts, like a cinematic still paused on screen I wish to explore the world inside each image. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is underpinned by the significant methods of Goldin’s embodiment and performance. The corporeality of the images is infused by Goldin’s practice as she is intrinsically immersed within every method of their creation. For example, looking at 'Sandra in the mirror, New York City 1985', in the chapter entitled ‘I Be Your Mirror’.

One is confronted with a captured image of femininity, one can see the subjects side profile and more intimately we are shown her enlivened reflection, her make up at hand on the shelf before her. One can presume Goldin is at her side also getting ready and partaking in this familiar feminine ritual.  Each image allows for its own interpretation or indeed multiple interpretations, as Ryan suggests      

‘a work that defines only one point on the narrative trajectory presents the spectator not with a specific story but with an array of narrative possibilities’ (Ryan, 2004: 141).

As the narrative trajectory unfolds throughout The Ballad of Sexual Dependency thematic representations occur, corporeality, gender, sexuality through documented memories and experiences.

'The kind of knowledge of history that Goldin's affective documentary creates is thus inseparable from her subject matter, and it is because of this that we can find cultural specificity in her work' (Ruddy, 2009:358).

Through a process of employing contextual analysis and examining the cultural specificity of the narratives illustrated as a research methodology I can begin to unpack The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency from a curatorial practice perspective.

Bibliography

Goldin, N., 1986. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, New York: Aperture.

Hamilton, P., 1997. Representing the Social: France and Frenchness in Post-War Humanist Photography. In: S. Hall, ed. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage Publications, p.87. 

Ruddy,S., 2009. A Radiant Eye Yearns from Me": Figuring Documentary in the Photography of Nan Goldin. Feminist Studies, [e-Journal] 35 (2). Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40607972 [Accessed 16 January 2013].

Ryan, M., 2004. Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Further Reading

The following texts have also provided an insight into how contextual analysis can be used as an important research methodology. Mitchell in particular looks at how photography lends itself to interpretation and contextual analysis as a research method and also suggests the ambiguities of representation. 

'A picture, then, is a very peculiar and paradoxical creature, both concrete and abstract, both a specific individual thing and a symbolic form that embraces a totality. To get the picture is to get a comprehensive, global view of the situation, yet it is also to take a snapshot at a specific moment – the moment when the click of a camera shutter registers the taking of a picture, whether it is the establishment of a cliché or stereotype, the institution of a system, or the opening of a poetic world (perhaps all three). To get the whole picture of pictures, then, we cannot remain content with the narrow conception of them, nor can we imagine that our results, no matter how general or comprehensive, will be anything more than a picture of images, objects, subjects and media as they appear to someone of us at this moment’ (Mitchell, 2005: xvii).

'Photography’s true nature is found in its automatic realism and naturalism, or in its tendency to aestheticize and idealize by rendering things pictorial. It is praised for its incapacity for abstraction, or condemned for its fatal tendency to produce abstractions from human reality. It is declared to be independent of language, or riddled with language. Photography is a record of what we see, or a revelation of what we cannot see, a glimpse of what was previously invisible’ (Mitchell, 2005: 274).

Mitchell, W.J.T., 2005. What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  

Rose, G. 2001. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, London: Sage Publications

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Why Nan Goldin? Life, Death and everything in between.

'My visual diary is public; it expands from its subjective basis with the input of other people. These pictures may be an invitation to my world, but they were taken so that I could see the people in them. I sometimes don’t know how i feel about someone until I take his or her picture. I don’t select people in order to photograph them; I photograph directly from my life. These pictures come out of relationships, not observation’ (Goldin, 1986).

The publication of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency itself provides a curated collection of photographs which encapsulate a visual diary of Goldin’s life. These images are not only enriched by characters from her life, primarily friends and lovers but also provide an autobiographical documentation, illustrating themes of sexuality, addiction, domestic violence and the Aids epidemic which ravaged her close circle of friends. Goldin discusses these images as representing a theme of alienation and in turn depicts her own and indeed her subjects desire to get close to one another, evocatively illustrating what she describes as ‘the struggle between dependency and autonomy’ (Goldin, 1996). It is this contentious conflict between dependency and autonomy documented throughout The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a curated collection of photographs which lends itself to this exercise in Research Methodologies, through a process of contextual analysis to define, analyse and critique the various thematic representations throughout Goldin’s images.

Bibliography

Goldin, N., 1986. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, New York: Aperture.

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'I thought that by photographing people enough I could never lose them' - Nan Goldin

From the documentary -  In My Life, Goldin discusses her  ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ retrospective exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art 1996-1997, curated by Elisabeth Sussman.