
'Joana and Aurèle Making Out in my Apartment', NYC
Nan Goldin always works according to the maxim to approach with her camera only those who are close to her. She is a passionate chronicler of interpersonal relationships and love with all its merciless facets.
Photography opens up to her as a visual diary, which she skillfully expands upon without embellishment. Her photographs culminate again and again in her Ballad of Sexual Dependency, arranged as a slide show, whose sequence of images she constantly rearranges. Goldin's unsparing gaze is directed at the abysses and confusions of her life and the lives of her friends. She often accompanies her friends over years and decades, sometimes even to their deathbeds. A voyeuristic predatory gaze is alien to her because she doesn't have to conquer other people's intimate areas, she is already part of them. "My photographs arise from relationships, not from observations," she once said. Love as an abstract idea does not interest Goldin, but love as an activity does. The present large-format print comes from the collection of Walter Keller, with whose Scalo Verlag she realized several book projects.
LITERATURE Nan Goldin, Luzifers Garten, Berlin 2003, p. 167. (here titled in German 'Zungenkuss Joana und Aurèle, Joana und Aurèle beim Petting in meinem Apartment, New York City 1999