Nan
Goldin: Who is she?
Nan Goldin is an American documentary photographer. She
was born in 1953 Washington DC. Nan was born in Washington DC. However she grew
up living in Boston, Massachusetts and
was born into a Jewish family household.
At the age of 15 was the first time Nan had held a
camera. Nan was part of the Satya Community school, in Lincoln. She referred to
the school as a ‘hippie’ school, and said how free spirited it was and how you
could pretty much do whatever you wanted to do in the school. Nan was given a
camera to try out by one of her teachers, and this is when she found her love
for photography.
Goldin graduated university in 1977. In which she then
started progressing in her photography. She moved to New York City and this is
where most of her photos are set, as she was interested in subcultures around
New York throughout the ages. Especially in the 90’s when there were different
cyber punk, oddly glamorous type cliques. Like every photographer, she had a
style...
Whats
her style?
Nan Goldin’s style of photography is known as documentary
photography. Overall, documentary photography is just like documentary films.
They are documenting a particular part of something. For most photographers
this is documenting something they find intriguing or maybe documenting
memories or something in they’re life. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_photography)
It’s easy to understand what is meant by documentary photography. It is not
just taking a picture. Every picture has a style. This is a huge convention in
photography and this is how photographers become well known. So documentary
photography has a theme. So of course Nan Goldin had a style to her photos. Nan’s
style is just this. Nan is known for documenting her life, her friends and
things she saw around her. She was known for taking pictures of her friends,
the gay and transsexual community and the cyber punk era, like said above.
Her work can sometimes be somewhat controversial.
Sometimes her pictures can be sometimes sexually explicit and also according to
some people ‘glamorizing drugs’ especially the use of heroin. Goldin actually
had censorship problems when her work was shown in Brazil as the pictures were
too explicit to put up, due to minors being there, however they will still
shown. Her work was moved in Feb 2012, to her own exhibition, so people could
have the choice, weather they wanted to see her photos.
It also needs to
be said that her pictures were mainly token in the 90’s era. A lot of her
pictures have quite a club kid feel to them. And you can tell this from the appearance
of the people in the pictures.
The good thing about Nan’s pictures is that they are overall
visual, and what I mean by that is that her pictures are interesting to look at
and interesting to view. Her pictures went quickly into being lengthy slideshows,
for example, one of her slideshows she had 800 of her photos and was shown in a
45 minute time slot. And it is by far her most famous. She has also done lots
of exhibitions, Like said above. Lots of her exhibitions were disturbing.
Another one of her exhibitions was called Sisters, Saints and Sybils. Out of
all her exhibitions and slideshows this was her most cinematic piece of work.
It had a more deeper story than any of her other pictures, that showed day to
day life of her. In fact the story behind the images was about the suicide of
her sister Barbra. The photos were turned into moving images, to create a
story.
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