Nan Goldin Kim between sets

cm 141 x 70

Self-educated, Nan Goldin began to photograph when she was in high school in Massachusetts, candidly narrating private moments of friends and acquaintances at home, in bars and on the street. After living in London for a brief interval, she took up residence in New York at the end of the 1970s. In this period, she abandoned black and white for color and a flash, more appropriate for the subjects that attracted her – daily life and night life in the clubs that she captured in detail, providing her spectators with the most intimate details of the atmosphere. From the second half of the 1980s, Goldin’s work began to be recognized in Europe and the United States, in coincidence with episodes in her life that had a decisive influence on her photography. From that moment, she began to document the daily life of her friends, many of them stricken by Aids. She registered the course of their illness, shot explicitly erotic portraits and, in 1999, dedicated a series to the transformation of her friend Greer from man to woman. In the 1990s Goldin benefited from a study grant from the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst), lived three years in Berlin and then travelled in Europe, Japan and Italy (especially Naples). The photographs of these years still present many themes linked to underground night life, but with the connotation of greater positivity. Among these, the "Kim between sets" portrait demonstrates the artist’s preference for images that are capable of revealing, even amid the details of night life or in more explicit scenes, a sense of daily routine and family intimacy. The shot taken in a normal moment, without sensationalism even in the “heavy” scenes, is the aspect that distinguishes the work of this artist.

No

E. Sussman. D. Armstrong (eds.), Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror, New York, Zürich 1996. J. Jenkinson (ed.), Nan Goldin: The Devil’s Playground, London 2003. G. Costa (ed.), Nan Goldin, London 2005; N. Goldin, Eden and After, London 2014.

Foto Roberto Galasso

Donation by Claudia Gian Ferrari

Photography