scale, powerful, and intense, a claim which she her-
self makes. Unlike cinema, Goldin insists on the
truthful unposed nature of her work, thus aligning
herself with photography’s fidelity to realism,
openly introducing her authorial relationships to
the subject, through titles that give her subject’s
name and the place where the photograph was
taken. Goldin has encouraged this reading of her
work as autobiographical, famously describing
The Ballad of Sexual Dependencyas ‘‘the diary I
let people read.’’ She challenges the notion that
gender is biological and shows the constructed nat-
ure of gender roles, tracking what she calls ‘‘the
third gender.’’
Born to an affluent Boston family, Goldin started
photographing at age 15 after her elder sister com-
mitted suicide, which Goldin stated helped her deal
with that tragedy. Goldin left home at an early age
and lived with various foster families as a teenager.
She attended art school, where she planned to do
fashion photography and studied at New England
School of Photography with Henry Horenstein, who
influenced her snapshot aesthetic. She later attended
the Boston School of Fine Arts, where her room-
mates, the subjects of her first show in 1975, were
two drag queens whom she photographed at home
and at gay bars. In 1978, she moved to New York
City, where she became involved in a thriving art
scene emerging around the East Village.
Goldin’s work has been associated with the
unposed photographs of Larry Clark and the
banal ‘‘outtakes’’ of contemporary artist Jack Pier-
son. Goldin has also been associated with Cindy
Sherman, who similarly documents the constructed
nature of gendered identity, glamour, and self-pre-
sentation. Goldin acknowledges debts to Nobu-
yoshi Araki, painters Barnett Newman and Mark
Rothko (in her use of empty spaces and her visual
clarity), as well as to sixteenth-century painter Car-
avaggio’s sensual portraits. Within the history of
photography, she has been associated with the por-
traiture of August Sander and Diane Arbus; how-
ever, unlike these two photographers, Goldin is part
of the group she documents and uses her images as a
form of emotional connection, rather than distance.
This claim to ‘‘insider documentary’’ also allows
her to disavow criticisms of voyeurism and exoti-
cism. As Goldin has stated, ‘‘I’m not crashing. This
is my party. This is my family, my friends.’’ She also
takes self-portraits, further blurring her role as
photographer vis-a`-vis her subjects.
Goldin’s work initially was presented as evolving
slide shows for downtown audiences composed of
those who participated in the fringe culture life-
styles she documented. HerBallad of Sexual Depen-
dencyseries, made between 1978 and 1996, was her
first large slide show and comprises over 700 images
set to an eclectic soundtrack. It later was published
as a book. Her photographing of her community
of her friends enabled those who became familiar
with her work to follow her subject, even allowing
the viewer to follow the breakdown of relation-
ships, death from AIDS or addiction, and addiction
recovery, such as in the five-panel seriesGilles and
Gotscho, 1992–1993. Goldin was also unscathing
in her self-portrayal, as her own drug and alcohol
abuse landed her in the hospital in late 1988.
Goldin’s break with the photographer’s presumed
neutral gaze is vividly evident in her bookThe Other
Side. This series documents the intimate relation-
ships and communities of transsexuals, depicting
them at nightclubs and at events like Wigstock
and other gay pride events. Like the Ballad of
Sexual Dependency, Goldin presented these photo-
graphs as slide shows at weekly dinner parties.
Goldin challenged the traditional values of art
and portrait photography with her 1996 Whitney
Museum, New York, retrospectiveI’ll Be Your
Mirror.One of the few female photographers to
have been featured in a solo exhibition at the
Whitney, it represented a turning point in Goldin’s
career and her entry into the mainstream contem-
porary art world. The photographs shown in this
exhibition, demonstrate her preferred settings:
interior spaces in which private dramas are played
out, particularly cluttered kitchens and bath-
rooms, rumpled beds, downtown bars, nightclubs,
and other gathering places. These photographs are
always acutely attuned to the intricate negotia-
tions between people and their surroundings.
Among Goldin’s strengths is her use of color as
a catalyst for amplifying the motional tenor of the
moment. In one of her better known images,Nan
and Brian in Bed, NYC 1983, the scene is illumi-
nated with an orange glow that captures the mood
of a painful and dying relationship as Goldin
captures herself lying behind her lover on the
bed, distant and alone. Nan One Month after
Being Battered, NYC 1984is a startling portrait
of painful self-confrontation, her lipstick garishly
echoing the blood from her injured eye. Nan’s
images are acutely aware of the politics of looking
and the power dynamics involved in the seer and
the seen. By immersing the viewer in the lives of
people not normally seen on the big screen, Nan
humanizes them, telling their story and her own
with vivid clarity and careful sympathy.
InAll By Myself-Beautiful at Forty, 1953–1995,
Goldin expands the theme of autobiography as a
narrative form. A moving sequence of 83 self-por-GOLDIN, NAN