I write shameless love letters about nan goldin's work on a weekly basis, under the guise of academic advancement. I reckon at the very least if I put them up on here it justifies their existence more-so than being stored in the cardboard box of my failing sanity.
In truth i'd like to think i'm eventually working towards something where Vilem Flusser left off, but really i'm not. I'm just a wanker with a camera, a pen, and too much wine.
The medium of photography is one that has always been used to some degree or another to make a record of an event, or series of events. Ever since the camera was put on the consumer market they have been purchased for precisely this reason, to document a holiday or wedding for example, in order to preserve a memory of the occasion. It is in focusing solely on these isolated moments of family solidarity however, that the everyman amateur neuters the truth of their lives; censoring their memories to appear a rose-tinted spectacle of happiness. They divorce themselves entirely from the 20th Century fine-art photographer’s notion of the snapshot; where the photograph is an unflinching mirror to reality and a philosophically engaging vehicle to the Truth.
‘In family photography and now in home-video, the celebratory is sought out through the visualisation of healthily functioning familial roles. What remains absent in such images however, are things we perceive as culturally mundane or taboo. Art photography on the other hand, while embellishing the aesthetics of family snaps, often substitutes the emotional flip-side for their expected scenarios: sadness, disputes, addiction and illness. It also takes as its subjects the non-events of daily life.’ (charlotte cotton)
Practitioners of this style of photography first appeared in the early 1970’s. Larry Clark’s Tulsa, released in 1971 is an eight year record of Clark and his friends engaging in sex, drugs and posing with guns, among other things, and was a controversial success on its release. However, despite Clark’s consistent and graphic depictions of a suburban subculture, it was Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency published fifteen years later that epitomised the idea of the visual diarist, and brought autobiographical photography to the attention of the mainstream art world.
Goldin’s work, unlike those before her, was never initiated with the preconception that it might one day in the future be published. It was initiated by a personal desire to preserve those around her whom she loves and fears to lose (a therapeutic response to her eighteen year old sister’s suicide.) It can be seen as an almost obsessive compulsion, to photograph so consistently and intimately the events and daily lives of herself and her friends. ‘Her description of the event of her sister’s suicide... vividly justifies the sense of urgency with which she photographs what is emotionally significant to her own version of history.’ (charlotte cotton)
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is an intimate account of Goldin’s life living in The Bowery New York with her ‘family’; made up largely of ‘third-gender’ drag queens, homosexuals and recreational drug users. The nature of these people along with Goldin’s unflinching persistence in photographing them gave audiences of the time a rare glimpse into New York’s counter-culture. One of Goldin’s favourite photographs for example, Greer and Robert on the bed, 1982, is evidence of an intimate moment which is fraught with a very real tension. The body of Greer is hunched to one side of the bed clutching her wrist whilst Robert runs his hand through his hair, looking away out of the frame. The certain squalor that surrounds them is not the focus of attention, because, as is usual with Goldin’s work, the lifestyle and living conditions of her friends takes a backseat to the reality of the moment, which the viewer is confronted with. ‘Every one of Goldin’s photographs, today just as much as twenty years ago, is like a window opening on a labyrinthine body of stories – some happy, some tragic – in which drugs, homosexuality, excess and transvestism are secondary elements.’ (guido costa)
To resolve why audiences appreciate the ‘visual diarist’ movement as a whole, it would firstly be beneficial to consider Goldin’s work against that of her predecessor, Clark’s. After all, Clark’s work is in the same vein as Goldin’s and was published fifteen years previously, and yet it is Goldin who is widely acknowledged as the movements figurehead; an interesting inconsistency worthy of exploring.
Both of these artists have embedded themselves among the fringes of society; Goldin with the transvestite community of New York’s Bowery, and Clark among the youth communes of Tulsa, Oklahoma. These groups correlate somewhat in their photographed lifestyles; drug-taking, casual sex, deviance and violence are all a standard depiction by both practitioners. Aside from the obvious difference of Goldin working in colour saturated transparency film, and Clark in gritty black and white, it is the way the subjects are approached and represented, down to the very captions which describe them, that separates these artists. Photography critic Gerry Badger notes of Goldin’s work:
‘the book is about relationships – about Goldin’s relationships with her friends and lovers certainly, but also about the nurturing yet often corrosive nature of human relationships generally. That makes The Ballad a more complex work than, say, Clark’s Tulsa...Goldin looks beyond the sleazy glamour of sex and drugs...’ (genius of photography)
The fact that Goldin does indeed transcend the obvious presence of sex and drugs, mere coincidences that take a backseat to her friends and loved ones, she has created a body of work about relationships and gender roles (and the inversion thereof), and it is these universal factors to which society can relate.
Clark on the other hand, though indulging in drugs alongside his friends throughout the making of Tulsa, divorces himself somewhat from those depicted. For example the cover shot of Tulsa titled Dead 1970 (1970) is a very abrupt statement, giving nothing, elaborating on nothing to the audience. Clark’s friend Billy Mann stares out of the frame, posing with a raised gun. It is a positively emotionless sentiment on Clark’s part to caption this photograph ‘Dead’. It is very different from Goldin’s approach to the death of a friend, Gotscho kissing Gilles (1993) for example, though shocking, maintains a certain tenderness when the subject is clearly days, if not, hours away from death. Perhaps then, it is Goldin’s ability to empathise that has made her appear more humane, more appealing and relatable to audiences. The emotional depth captured in the intertwining narratives of her work transcends all that is squalid and otherworldly about her life and presents a raw and universally accessible series of photographs; ‘Like the best photography, it holds up a mirror to its time.’ (genius of photography)
It is also important to mention that Goldin has been consistent in who she photographs. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency through to The Devil’s playground (2003) have all been visual diaries of her world and her friends. Larry Clark on the other hand proceeded from the work on his friends in Tulsa to make Teenage Lust (1983) in which he documents teenagers previously unknown to him, whilst he himself is in his late thirties. This deviates from his previous autobiographical work in that these teenagers were purposely sought out, and thus not an honest reflection or representation of an autobiographical self.
If it is the realism and the honesty that struck audiences, and brought these artists to prominence, then it is interesting to consider the generation of photographers that followed.
Goldin’s massive success in using the snapshot diary aesthetic influenced a new generation of photographers. This, however, marks a turning point in what it meant to be a visual diarist. The photographer Ryan Mcginley, whose first collection of photographs The Kids are Alright (2002) was directly influenced by both Clark and Goldin, and as such he knew of the successes this style could bring.
‘The prospect of an emerging photographer having only an unwitting affinity with the work of Nan Goldin is increasingly unlikely. As a teenager, Mcginley had met Larry Clark and taken up photography... the implication of this publicized biography is that, early on, he knew that there was the possibility that his images of him and his friends lives could one day receive public recognition’ (charlotte cotton)
Mcginley, as Cotton states, would have been conscious whilst photographing his friends that there was the potentiality for fame and profit to be gained from them. This directly contends with Goldin’s motives for photographing, her entirely personal desire to maintain memories of existence.
Mcginley’s first body of work also contends with the thematic intentions of his predecessors’ down to its very name ‘The Kids are alright’, refuting the ideals of existing diaristic practitioners who dwelled in realms of drugs and love and chaos.
In doing this however, Mcginley risks divorcing himself from what it is to be a fine-art diarist. By photographing only the positive and memorable aspects of life and youth he aligns himself with the self-deluding amateur who photographs his family only at their happiest and on their holidays. Many of the images in The Kids are alright show friends running naked through fields or sitting in trees, aesthetically well executed perhaps, but the introduction of nudity in these images indicates a guise to which Mcginley distracts us from the lack of truth and depth- something which, obviously, Goldin gives us in abundance.
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