Nan Goldin

A detailed Summary of Nan Goldin

As a documentary photographer there is a certain knowledge that needs to be held of the subject matter. What makes Nan Goldin stand out is that all of her subjects are people who are closely involved in her life, and sometimes even herself, which gives her the ultimate knowledge. Her life is not mutually exclusive from theirs', and I think that's what gives her photographs a life of their own that is just as intimate as if we, the viewer, were actually there. The idea that many times she was photographing as a means of recording events of days and nights that she was unable to recall due to alcohol and drugs, makes her images have even more of an impact.

Nan Goldin started photographing in Boston, taking pictures of herself and her friends in different costumes, and progressed on to photographing drag queens in their regalia. She continued with similar themes and grew to include the unavoidable aspects of her life, which were the affects, and occasional death, of those around her due to sexual and chemical addiction. These documentations evolved in to an intimate col

Some of her work has followed her friends through the glamour and melodrama of drugs and sex in the eighties, to their death later in life, and paints a picture of the love and despair that comes with living such a lifestyle. It's a harsh light to shed on this group of friends, but the fact that Goldin is taking these photographs without intending to portray the people in them in any specific way other than how they are, herself included, and is what makes these such powerful documentations. The life she lives is one we can only sympathize with based on what she shows us through her photography, and it's pretty stark. The fact that her work is just as much for her to record her own personal past, as it is for the viewer to understand her life make them, almost, hard to perceive individually.

What makes her work so real is that it changes as her life changes. She has abandoned her earlier photographs of drag queens and sexual exploration, which was indicative of her life at the time, and has moved forward to photograph children in a different stage of exploration, and even landscape

Some common words found in the essay are:
Nan Goldin, Nan Goldin's, nan goldin, drag queens,

Approximate Word count = 748
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: People

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