The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
from Aperture
Fantastic Tales: The Photography of Nan Goldin
by Jonathan Weinberg
from Palmer Museum of Art
"We all tell stories which are versions of history—memorized, encapsulated, repeatable, and safe. 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 end." —Nan Goldin
This book accompanies an exhibition of Nan GoldinÂ’s photographs, drawn from the private collection of Gerry and David Pincus and jointly organized by the Palmer Museum of Art at The Pennsylvania State University and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Over the last thirty years, Goldin has attained international fame as a photographer who, building on the tradition of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, has documented the lives of outsiders. But in GoldinÂ’s case, the outsiders are her bohemian friends, whom she depicts with poignant and sometimes brutal honesty.
Jonathan Weinberg’s essay for this catalogue considers a number of Goldin’s now-classic photographs as well as her more recent, almost Baroque forays into landscape. In contrast to most earlier writers on Goldin’s work, who have emphasized its documentary character, Weinberg addresses the ways in which Goldin’s photographs might be said to constitute "fantastic tales." Weinberg considers the narrative construction of Goldin’s work from a double perspective—personal as well as critical—that complicates even as it enriches his interpretations.
Nan Goldin: The 2007 Hasselblad Award (The Hasselblad Award Library)
from Steidl
The Hasselblad Award is the most important international photography prize in the world today, and since 1980 award winners have included some of the greatest names the medium has known. The award is granted to "a photographer recognized for major achievement"; this may be an individual who has made a pioneering achievement in photography, who has had a decisive impact on one or more younger generations of photographers, or one who has implemented one or more internationally significant photographic projects.
The 2007 Hasselblad Award winner is Nan Goldin, easily one of the most significant photographers of our time. Adopting the direct aesthetics of snapshot photography, she has documented her own life and that of her friends and others on the margins of society for more than 30 years, offering frank depictions of drug abuse, cross-dressing and alternative sexualities. Her intimate photographs depict urban lives in New York and Europe in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, a period massively determined by HIV and AIDS. Her practice of photography as a memoir and as a defense against loss, and her use of the slide show to present her work, resonate increasingly in the work of photographers of recent generations.
Devil's Playground
by Nick Cave
from Phaidon Press Inc.
THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND is the most significant book published to date on Nan Goldin (b. 1953), one of the most prominent and influential contemporary photographers. It contains Goldin's latest works alongside earlier classics, including images from new series such as ELEMENTS, 57 DAYS, STILL ON EARTH, and FROM HERE TO MATERNITY, many of which are published here for the first time. This book is an intimate and compelling photographic portrait, telling personal stories of relationships and identity while chronicling different eras and the passage of time. Goldin's photographic sequences are interspersed with texts, poems, and lyrics by prominent writers.
Singular Images
by Darsie Alexander
from Aperture
Spanning 170 years, from William Henry Fox Talbot's first negative to Jeff Wall's latest constructed tableau, Singular Images collects thought-provoking essays on individual photographs, one image per writer. The essayists consider, sometimes in highly personal ways, the artist's intention, their own response, the work's technical complexities, its historical context or its formal properties. Each text captures a sense of how challenging it is to create a perfect single piece. Art photography has been increasingly well-surveyed in recent years, but individual works have rarely been written about at length, perhaps because of lingering doubt that a single photograph can command the kind of sustained attention often given to individual paintings or sculptures. Singular Images is a lively inquiry into the value of analyzing individual photographs, and it persuasively encourages the reader to engage at length and in depth with one remarkable piece at a time. With its broad scope and diverse range of issues, it can also be read as an informal--and thoroughly entertaining--introduction to art photography. Featuring essays by some of the most brilliant critical minds in the field, including David Campany on Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Darsie Alexander on Nan Goldin and Liz Jobey on Diane Arbus.
Nan Goldin (Monographs)
by Guido Costa
from Phaidon Press
Recognized internationally for her intimate and compelling images, the American photographer Nan Goldin (b.1953) has lived and worked in Boston, New York, Berlin and in Paris, her current home. Since the early 1970s Goldin has taken numerous photographs of her friends and 'family', which form a significant and important body of work. She is most famous for her Ballad of Sexual Dependency photographs, a constantly changing slide show of approximately 750 photographs set to music. Goldin's life and friends became the focus of her work – a diary of friends and lovers in Europe and America, in the underground and gay scene. This accessible monograph is the perfect introduction to her work.
Tokyo Love: Spring Fever 1994
by Nan Goldin
from Scalo Publishers
Americans: The Social Landscape From 1940 until 2006
by Peter Weiermair
from Damiani
A bakers' dozen of the best photographers of the past hundred years, from Helen Levitt and Gordon Parks to Nan Goldin and Ryan McGinley, are brought together here in a series of portfolios expanding on Robert Frank's Americans. Together they consider generations of social upheavals, crises, and shifts in U.S. society, responding to societal problems with attitudes from concerned to ecstatic. Helen Levitt's East Village and Bruce Davidson's are the same, and yet nothing alike, as are Richard Avedon's Texas and Rosalind Solomon's New Orleans, Diane Arbus's periphery and Lee Friedlander's loneliness at the center of the world, Peter Hujar's transsexuals and Larry Clark's boys. While the "concerned photography" of the mid-twentieth century can seem to demand the acceptance of the nonconformist behavior it tracks, and the recognition of social ills, the most recent contributions here avoid those moral undertones, documenting the hedonistic cult of youth, its promiscuity and ideology of fun. They do not judge but may provoke viewers into their own judgments, and always to thought.
Adonis: Masterpieces of Erotic Male Photography
by Michelle Olley
from Running Press
So the Story Goes: Photographs by Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Larry Sultan (Art Institute of Chicago)
by Katherine A. Bussard
from Art Institute of Chicago
Each of these artists has created highly personal, shifting, and intriguing visions of his or her life. The works range from Tina Barney’s orchestrated depictions of her friends and family in affluent New England settings to Nan Goldin’s unabashed portrayal of intimate, and often brutally honest, moments. Sally Mann turned to her children and their surroundings as her subject, and Larry Sultan has accomplished something similar in his depictions of his parents. Philip-Lorca diCorcia offers up his “storybook life” in photographs that—like others in this group—span nearly twenty years.
So the Story Goes is arranged in portfolio format and features beautiful color reproductions of about twenty photographs by each artist. With an introductory essay that examines the development of personal narrative in photography, as well as insightful entries on each artist, the book analyzes how these works tell a life’s story.
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