Facebook does not show all the posts we make, if you want to receive our excellent content and get an email when we make a new post click the Follow this Blog button. Don't bother with Facebook
Oxford School of Photography
insights into photography
Tag Archives: Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin Photographer
April 5, 2012
Posted by on Rather surprisingly our most successful post ever has been about Nan Goldin, a photographer of great merit but who probably divides opinions. This from the Tate website gives an artist biography and has images.
“American photographer. Goldin began taking photographs as a teenager in Boston, MA. Her earliest works, black-and-white images of drag queens, were celebrations of the subcultural lifestyle of the community to which she belonged. During a period of study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she began displaying her work in the format of a slide-show, a constantly evolving project that acquired the title (appropriated from The Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht) The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 1981. This collection of images had a loose thematic structure and was usually shown with an accompanying sound-track, first in the clubs where many of the images were taken and then within gallery spaces. In the 1990s Goldin continued to produce portraits of drag queens, but also made images of friends who were dying of AIDS and recorded her experiences travelling in Asia…”.….MORE
Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a taxi, NYC 1991
© Nan Goldin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Nan one month after being battered 1984 Nan Goldin
© Nan Goldin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Greer and Robert on the bed, NYC 1982
© Nan Goldin, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
There is a very interesting interview by Angelique Chrisafis in The Guardian
‘My camera has saved my life’
From New York’s druggy nightlife to her parents ‘making out’, Nan Goldin chronicles the real and the raw. She talks to Angelique Chrisafis about art, pornography and tabloid critics
“Nan Goldin leads me into the bedroom of her Paris apartment, fluffs up a pillow and settles down on her bed, lighting a cigarette. Her pink dressing gown hangs over the door of her wardrobe; there are black and white stills on the wall. It’s fitting that the legendary photographer should want us to talk in her bedroom, side by side on the patterned bedspread: long before Tracey Emin’s unmade chaos, Goldin specialised in the silences of rumpled sheets. Since the early 1970s, she has shot herself and friends in bed – having sex, sleeping, arguing and, after Aids struck, dying. She curled up with her boyfriend Brian, and later shot a bruised self-portrait after he hit her.”.…MORE
Here are some links for further study
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Goldin
http://www.matthewmarks.com/artists/nan-goldin/
http://www.artnet.com/artists/nan-goldin/
Paul Graham wins 2012 Hasselblad award
March 14, 2012
Posted by on Self-taught photographer becomes first British winner of international prize for recognition of major achievements, writes Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian.
“Paul Graham has been named as the winner of the 2012 Hasselblad award, which is presented annually to “a photographer recognised for major achievements”. It is the first time a British photographer has won the prestigious international prize. Previous recipients include Robert Adams (2009), Nan Goldin (2007) and William Eggleston (1998).
Graham, who had a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London last year, is a self-taught photographer. He was born in Buckinghamshire and discovered photography through the books of great American pioneers like Robert Frank, Walker Evans and Paul Strand. He has lived in New York since the early 1990s. Graham first garnered critical acclaim with his early documentary work, including A1 – The Great North Road (1983) , a series shot in colour along the British motorway, and Beyond Caring (1985), which was shot in unemployment offices. Back then, Graham was a pioneer of colour in Britain, his work influencing subsequent generations of young photographers.”………MORE
Pittsburgh, 2004 (Lawnmower Man)From the series ‘A Shimmer of Possibilities’. Copyright of the artist, courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London.The Foundation’s citation regarding the decision to award the 2012 prize to Paul Graham is as follows:
“Paul Graham is one of the most brilliant photographers of his generation. During the course of his nearly 40-year career, he has presented an extremely focused body of work, at once perfectly coherent and never monotonous. In images both sensitive and subtly political, he makes tangible the insignificant traces of ″the spirit of the times″ we do not normally see. With his keen awareness of the photographic medium, he has constantly developed innovative forms of working with all aspects of photography. This makes him a profound force for renewal of the deep photographic tradition of engagement with the world.”
More of Graham’s pictures can be seen here
Photographer Nan Goldin’s best shots – from The Guardian
March 14, 2012
Posted by on Nan Goldin, is an artist and photographer that you either get or you don’t. Many people look at her pictures and struggle to understand why they are so lauded. Her work often has an autobiographical lead, showing the faces and more often bodies of those she shares her life with. You may know of her breakthrough work “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” and later “I’ll Be Your Mirror”
As Wikipedia says “She began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city’s vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the Bowery’s hard-drug subculture; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. These snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug overdose or AIDS; this tally included close friends and often-photographed subjects Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. In 2003, The New York Times nodded to the work’s impact, explaining Goldin had “forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last twenty years.” In addition to Ballad, she combined her Bowery pictures in two other series: “I’ll Be Your Mirror…..MORE from Wiki
The Guardian has an interview with Nan Goldin by Sarah Phillips
“I don’t photograph adults so much any more. I don’t have a child and, psychologically, my focus on them is a lot about me wishing that I did. But I am a godmother to friends’ children around the world – in Berlin, New York, Sweden and Italy. I don’t remember much ever feeling like a child, so maybe photographing them triggers memories. They are wild and magical, as if from another planet. And they haven’t been socially conditioned yet, so they can scream and express how they feel publicly. Sometimes I envy them. When I am in a group of people, the children and I find each other’s eyes, and end up laughing at the same, unspoken thing.
I’ve been taking pictures of children since the early 1980s, and it’s become increasingly important to me. I see a continuum in the children of my friends, some of whom have died. It’s about hoping that my friends will bring up a new species of people.”….I certainly think that my work comes from a humanistic vision of the world, rather than some kind of manipulative, theoretical version of art. It’s about the people and places I love, and that haunt me.” Here is the rest of the article
She was born a girl but chose to grow up as a boy’. Photograph: Nan Goldin
All images ©Nan Goldin. There is a gallery of Nan Goldin images on the Guardian website here
There are images for sale on the ArtNet site and a full biography, here is that link They also have a list of galleries currently selling her photographs here
from the Guardian article we learn…….
Influences: When I was starting out, John Cassavetes, Guy Bordin and August Sander. Now, Christer Stromholm and Anders Petersen.Top tip:Don’t do it. There are way too many photographers. Try to draw or get politically involved in something that matters. And unless you need to make art to stay alive, you shouldn’t be making art.High point: I appreciated everything as it came along – I didn’t know there would be more. But the retrospective at the Whitney in 1996, the last book I did, The Beautiful Smile, and my show at the Louvrewere real high points.Low point: The past seven years: I haven’t been able to publish a book because of a contract, and have been considered a dead artist.
Influences: When I was starting out, John Cassavetes, Guy Bordin and August Sander. Now, Christer Stromholm and Anders Petersen.Top tip:Don’t do it. There are way too many photographers. Try to draw or get politically involved in something that matters. And unless you need to make art to stay alive, you shouldn’t be making art.High point: I appreciated everything as it came along – I didn’t know there would be more. But the retrospective at the Whitney in 1996, the last book I did, The Beautiful Smile, and my show at the Louvrewere real high points.Low point: The past seven years: I haven’t been able to publish a book because of a contract, and have been considered a dead artist.