NAN GOLDIN (* 1953) - Joey at the Love Ball, NYC 1991

Cibachrome, printed in the 1990s, framed

40 x 60 cm

Signed, annotated, dedicated and dated by the photographer in ink on the reverse

PROVENANCE Private Collection Zurich, formerly collection of Walter Keller

LITERATURE Nan Goldin, The Other Side, Scalo 1992, p. 126-127.

"This is a book about beauty. And about love for my friends," Nan Goldin wrote in the preface to her 1993 photographs book The Other Side, which also features Joey at the Love Ball. The earliest photographs in it were taken in the 1970s, when Goldin lived in Boston with a group of drag queens. In the early 1980s, she captured the lives of her transgender friends in New York as AIDS began to shake their community. For more than three decades, Goldin created tender and heartfelt portraits of some of her dearest friends. We encounter Joey Goebel in many of these shots: sitting on the sofa without makeup, blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, or barely recognizable in a blue wig. In interviews and texts, Goldin calls her "goddess and survivor," "favorite beauty," "queen of Europe, North and South America, Asia and East 14th Street." However, the word "friend" comes up most often because, after all, Goldin only approaches people close to her with her camera. At the Love Ball in New York, Joey flickers towards us breathtakingly beautiful, as if proclaiming to us viewers the utopian promise of a world where gender is no longer a prison. The signed cibachrome comes from the estate of publisher Walter Keller, with whom Goldin has realized several projects since the 1990s.