The Body As A Political Site (journals)

Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin’s controversial and intimate portraits of friends and lovers document her involvement in the New York City post punk new wave musical climate of the 70s and 80s. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender (gay and transvestite subcultures), domesticity, domestic violence and sexuality. Usually made with available light.

Nan Goldin ''Nan after beeing battered'' 1984

(image from: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/goldin-nan-one-month-after-being-battered-p78045)

Personal is Political

It could easily be all about ''me, me, me'', as Goldin puts it and her detractors have charged, but the personal world she captured had a political edge, holding up a mirror to wider society. She says women all over the world have told her how important the self - portrait, ''Nan One Month After Being Battered'' (1984), has been in helping lift the lid on domestic violence. Goldin explains that she only took and kept this photograph so she could remember what Brian did to her and would not go back to him.

Her pictures of the gay scene in New York took on an added dimension as the world came to terms with the impact of AIDS.

Nan Goldin wrote:'' AIDS changed everything. The people I feel knew me the best, who understood me, the people who carried my history, the people I grew up with and I was planning to get old with are gone… I don’t believe photography stops time…I still believe pictures can preserve life rather than kill life. The pictures in the Ballad haven’t changed. But Cookie is dead, Kenny is dead, Mark is dead, Max is dead, Vittorio is dead. So for me, the book is now a volume of loss, while still a ballad of love.''

For many years Goldin was photographing people's external behaviour, their realationships, their sexuality and their gender identification. She has many friends who live between genders and she thinks that there are many varieties of gender and she has been obsessed with that all along so she photographed them and their lives and how happy and proud they were of their bodies.

“Misty and Jimmy Paulette in taxi'' by Nan Goldin (1991)

(image from: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/goldin-misty-and-jimmy-paulette-in-a-taxi-nyc-p78046)

Most of people Goldin photographed in 'The Ballad' died of AIDS. Her series ''The Cookie Portfolio'' shows her friend photographed from 1976 to her death from the syndrome in 1989. After Cookie died Goldin just wanted to isolate herself and it made her very detached from people as they were very close friends. She photographed some of her friends who were ill to try to keep them alive, to leave traces of their lives but then after some of them died she realized how little photography could preserve.

More recently, Goldin's found herself clashing with contemporary taboos about the depiction of children - especially in Britain - whom she has shot throughout her career ( ''The Ballad'' includes a sequence of seven images of children).

Reserching photographers for my theme (body as a political site) I realized that body has become seen as a political site within the recent years and it is shaped around politics and culture.
We live in a society that is very much obsessed with the body, there is a constant unspoken and sometimes spoken push for us to be normal/normalised and any kind of bodies that are seen as not normal are really excluded from society.

Goldin's work has always been misunderstood. It seems to be about drugs, sex, transvestites and parties but it is about the condition of beeing human, the pain, the ability to survive and how difficult that is, real life. Everything that Goldin saw on television had nothing to do with real life. She never wanted to be a aprt of a normal society so she wanted to make a record of it. She carried camera everywhere she went and recorded every aspect of her life and life of her friends. Camera functioned partially as Goldin's memory.
Goldin's approach to photography is very personal as she often puts herself at the centre of her own work. Photography is her way to communicate and 'to survive when she goes through something
scary or traumatic', she says.

Sources:

British Journal Of Photography - August 2011, Volume 158, issue...pages 27 -35, Interview with Nan Goldin.

Other resources I looked at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUX5rR5d4oQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xKDsrMH-Sg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ9-aSRvdf0