Nan Goldin is an American photographer best-known for her deeply personal and candid portraiture. Her photographs serve to document herself and those closest to her, particularly the LGBTQ community and associated heroin-addicted subcultures.
Influenced by the fashion photography of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, Goldin's earliest photographic works are portraits of close friends glamorously dressed in drag. From the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, while she was living in New York, Goldin continued to socialise with and photograph people of ambiguous gender. She intended her work to be an homage to their beauty and courage; exploring drag and its ability to fulfil the fantasy of reconstructed identities.
When Goldin first encountered drag queens in 1972, she quickly became obsessed.
She explained:
‘I was eighteen and felt like I was a queen too- they became my whole world. Part of my worship of them involved photographing them. I wanted to pay homage, to show them how beautiful they were. I never saw them as men dressing up as women, but as something entirely different - a third gender that made more sense than either of the other two. I accepted them as they saw themselves; I had no desire to unmask them with my camera.’
With her captivating and immediate 'snapshot' style, Nan Goldin's photography creates an intersection of autobiographical detail and documentary storytelling, as she honestly captures her friends as they live their lives, creating a body of work that is at once radical, intimate, personal, joyful and moving. Her circle of friends, subsumed as they were in the New York counter-culture of the 1970s and 80s, are shown in their beds, kitchens and living rooms, embracing, dancing, kissing, dressing, undressing and shooting up with a casual immediacy and frankness that can be disconcerting for the viewer. Yet Goldin was not a casual observer of this lifestyle, and was instead a close friend of all the people depicted, living with them and participating in this hedonistic lifestyle.
Today, Goldin’s works are held in collections worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Modern, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.