Kevin Tabora

Nan Goldin Presentation Summary

Nan Goldin first came across the world of photography when she was fifteen and her teacher gave the students cameras. When she first started taking photos, she worked in black and white photography. Taking photos of the trans community in . Nan’s work tends to have the subject of people in the LGBT community within her photos. This is because she wanted to use her work to bring light to what the community looked like and the types of things that were happening within the community. She also would go on to take photos of how the community was looking during the AIDS crisis. This would mean that her work would include actual people dying of AIDS and lying in a hospital bed as the subject.

In addition to photographing

LGBTQ experiences during the

AIDS crisis, Nan used herself as the subject of many photographs, including pictures of herself a month after being physically assaulted. These kinds of photos were her subject choices because she wanted people to understand that these specific issues are what the real world was like at the time. People needed to see real bodies living on the same soil as them and understand what was going on. She would even go on to use subjects of things like drug addiction, and abuse in her series called “The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency”. Going on to be one of the most popular series within her entire career.

Sources:

- Nan Goldin. (2020, November 13). Retrieved February 12, 2021, from https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/nan-goldin - The Guggenheim museums and foundation. (n.d.). Retrieved February 12, 2021, from https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/nan-g oldin - . (n.d.). Search results. Retrieved February 12, 2021, from https://www.tate.org.uk/search?aid=2649&type=art work