When I was a kid people would say, You didn’t see that; that didn’t happen […] You know, there was this web of denial […] And the only way I could feel that I could survive that, and maintain my own truth, was to start writing a diary when I was really young. […] Writing was the way I held on to my version of things… […] When I started taking pictures, I realized it was a way to make a real record of what I had actually seen and done.” (Armstrong and Keller 451) So when she was fourteen, she chose to escape from the home, where was rigid, stubborn, false and serious, to formed a new “Utopia family” with a group of young people who lived on the edge of society and loved the hippie culture. Most of these young people are artists and writers who despised traditional bourgeois life, indulged in alcohol, drugs and sex. They never live for others.

Richard Phelan is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Aix-Marseille Université. His doctoral thesis was devoted to aesthetic questions in modern American painting. His recent research concerns contemporary visual art and to zones of collaboration between visual and verbal art forms. He has published on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Allan McCollum, Ernest Pignon-Ernest and (Elaine) Sturtevant.In 2022, Goldin was awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize for her contributions to contemporary photography. A retrospective exhibition, “This Will Not End Well,” is touring European museums for the next couple of years, with an accompanying book coming in 2023. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the new documentary directed by Laura Poitras, covers Goldin’s life and work, with a focus on her P.A.I.N. activism. It won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival. urn:oclc:record:1349254867 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier nangoldinillbeyo0000suss Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2rptqthgz9 Invoice 1652 Isbn 0874271029 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).

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.

Friends and Lovers

Hujar and Morrisroe had already died of AIDS before the exhibition opened, as had Scarpati, Cookie Mueller’s husband. At the end of her essay, Goldin included a photo she’d taken of a grieving Mueller in front of her husband’s open casket. Mueller, too, would die of AIDS just a month after Goldin wrote the essay. Wojnarowicz would succumb to the disease in 1992. (Adding insult to injury, the National Endowment for the Arts initially withdrew its funding of the exhibition due to its “political” nature, but reinstated it as long as the money wasn’t used for the catalogue, where the “political” language appeared.)

Coellier Sylvie, dir. Des émotions dans les arts aujourd’hui. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2015. Cross-Dressing in Fact, Fiction and Fantasy / 2. Transnationalism and Modern American Women Writers Perhaps her sister’s suicide had a huge impact on Nan, when her memories of her sister gradually became blurred, she began to fear losing her loved ones and things. Therefore, Nan decided to use the camera to record the people around her and everything that happened. “Maybe I won’t lose anything in this way”, Nan thought. 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. Although Nan Goldin has a wealthy family, she did not have a happy childhood. At the age of eleven, her sister committed suicide in the rails, which is undoubtedly a fatal blow to Nan Goldin. Nan once said in an interview: “Everyone is always careful about everything around him. It is an environment that corrects all untimely things. For example, the matter of suicide by my sister is also said to be a cause.”

Le discours rapporté et l’expression de la subjectivité / 2.Modernist Non-fictional Narratives of War and Peace (1914-1950) In 1985 The Ballad slideshow was selected for inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. The following year, Goldin worked with curator Marvin Heiferman (who’d helped produce her slideshows for public viewing) to edit and compress The Ballad into a 127-image Aperture photo book of the same name. In a review in the New York Times, art critic Andy Grundberg wrote, “What Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ was to the 1950s, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is to the 1980s. . . . Goldin, at the age of 33, has created an artistic masterwork that tells us not only about the attitudes of her generation, but also about the times in which we live.” manner in which the presentation of works in museums is constructed rhythmically can be seen in the room devoted to Goldin in 2020 in Avignon (third and fourth slides) or in the hanging at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2014 (MoCA). Goldin’s founding work The Ballad is indeed a show, a work whose parameters are those of time as much as that of the space of the visual object. Moreover, when presenting a sequence of photographs in slide shows, the artist further transforms the still images into temporal works through the use of music. The songs not only tell stories akin to those in the pictures (the Brechtian story of alcohol, the Kitt story of solitude, or the Lou Reed and Nico story of partying and of fatal attraction), they also make the viewer sensuously aware of experiencing the images in time. What most structures the work therefore is its syntax, the assembly of one image with another. Tellingly, Goldin insists that The Ballad is not just a show or a wall display, but also a book, a sequential form she feels suited to photography—“It’s the only (visual) art that really works in books,” she says (MoCA). Goldin had her first solo show in 1973 at Project, Inc. in Boston. The following year she and Armstrong enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (as did Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe, who would go on to successful careers of their own); after graduating she moved with a group of friends first to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then to New York. Goldin had found her “extended family.” With her sister still at the forefront of her mind, she “became obsessed with never losing the memory of anyone again,” she said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. It was this that drove her to constantly photograph members of what she called her tribe. 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.

Standardisation and Variation in English Language(s) / 2. Modernist Non-fictional Narratives: Rewriting Modernism Relating / L'Écosse en relation / 2. Religion & civil society in Britain and the English-speaking world – What’s the English for “ laïcité”?Staniszewski, Mary Anne. The Power of Display. A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001. Just as Goldin’s career was taking off, she fell deeper and deeper into drug addiction. “The party was over but I couldn’t stop,” she said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. “I stayed shut up in my loft snorting drugs, going months without seeing daylight.” She entered a rehab clinic outside Boston and got sober in 1988. When she returned to New York, she found that many of her friends had contracted AIDS. 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. In 2007 Goldin won the prestigious Hasselblad Award. In 2010 the Louvre commissioned a slideshow and exhibition; Goldin titled it Scopophilia and intermixed her own images with those of historical works in the museum’s collections (from figures in Greek mythology to Rembrandt, Delacroix, and beyond)—drawing direct connections between depictions of desire, sexuality, gender, and violence over thousands of years. In the photo, her transvestite friends, determined, calm, and unduly to show their beautiful posture, this is the Nan’s early photography, which reflects the characteristics of the traditional documentary photography at that time: the photographer and the model are two individuals. They are only indifferent in their own space, with relationship but does not intimate. Moreover, the photographer records the life and state of the model, but can’t describe the essence behind the photo.