Variety: Photographs by Nan Goldin

by Nan Goldin (Photographer), James Crump (Editor)

When photographer Nan Goldin appeared on the art scene in the late 1970s, her tough, autobiographical frankness quickly established her in the all-male field of diaristic photographers. The beaten down and beaten up personages that populate Goldin’s work are icons now deeply inscribed in our collective memory. Variety: Photographs by Nan Goldin compiles the still photographs Goldin created for director Bette Gordon’s now-infamous 1983 independent film, Variety, and offers a rare glimpse into this artist’s symbiotic working process. Hallmarks of Goldin’s early work and the influence of filmmaking on Goldin’s prolific career are on display in this project. Hovering unsettlingly between fiction and reality, "documentary style" and art photography, Variety: Photographs by Nan Goldin reveals a curious and previously unexamined aspect of Goldin’s iconic career, and provides a window into the collision of music, club life, and art production that colored the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This is an important addition to Nan Goldin’s oeuvre.

Genres: Photography, Art

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Nan Goldin is an American photographer known for her deeply personal and candid portraiture. Goldin’s intimate images act as a visual autobiography documenting herself and those closest to her, especially in the LGBTQ community and the heroin-addicted subculture. Her opus The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980–1986) is a 40-minute slideshow of 700 photographs set to music that chronicled her life in New York during the 1980s. The Ballad was first exhibited at the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and was made into a photobook the following year. “For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody—it's a caress,” she said of the medium. “I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.”

Born Nancy Goldin on September 12, 1953 in Washington, D.C., the artist began taking photographs as a teenager to cherish her relationships with those she photographed, as well as a political tool to inform the public of issues that were important to her. Influenced both by the fashion photography of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin she saw in magazines, as well as the revelatory portraits of Diane Arbus and August Sander, Goldin captured herself and her friends at their most vulnerable moments, as seen in her seminal photobook Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996). In 2018, she collaborated with the clothing brand Supreme by including three of her photographs, Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a taxi, NYC (1991), Kim in Rhinestones, Paris (1991), and Nan as a dominatrix, Cambridge, MA (1978) on their spring/summer collection.

The artist currently lives and works between New York, NY, and Paris, France. Today, Goldin’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among others.

Reviews

[Dylan Kiewel · Rating 4 out of 5]

cool movie, cool pics. surprised nan didn't shoot the movie cause it is just as compelling to look at and done similarly to these. see a lot of Hopper in these.

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such insight here, and a pleasant break from really what you expect from Goldin. Used as photos for/from a film, this bottom dwelling gaze at a NYC long gone. Sad and beautiful, feminine longing. Hits the spot.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

inspiring.