Flore's Thoughts

I thought I would start a new series of posts about artists I like. I will try to choose one artist every week and write something about him/her and include a few works.

So, the series starts with Nan Goldin – since I already wrote about the two photographers i like most(Francesca Woodman and Diane Arbus).

Nan Goldin is an American fine-art and documentary photographer. She was born in Washington in 1953 and grew up in Boston, where she was first introduced to photography. Her photos are intense portraits of people from Goldin’s life – drag queens, drug addicts, lovers and family – and put together they could be seen as a journal made public to everyone who is willing to appreciate it. Goldin herself has commented on her photographic style and philosophy, saying, “My work originally came from the snapshot aesthetic . . . Snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places, and shared times. They’re about creating a history by recording a history.”

Her works are usually presented as slide shows which are added to a soundtrack of music, her most famous being a 45 minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. Some critics have accused her of making heroin-use appear glamorous, and of pioneering a grunge style that later became popularized by youth fashion magazines such as The Face and I-D.

I really like her works, they are similar to snapshots but the colors, lighting and composition make them unique. Apparently, the photographs by Lucy Berliner, played by actress Ally Sheedy in the 1998 film High Art, were based on those by Goldin. I thought the style seemed familiar when watching the movie, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Here are a few of her works:

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Goldin
http://www.brain-juice.com/cgi-bin/show_bio.cgi?p_id=88