In the photo, her transvestite friends, determined, calm, and unduly to show their beautiful posture, this is the Nan’s early photography, which reflects the characteristics of the traditional documentary photography at that time: the photographer and the model are two individuals. They are only indifferent in their own space, with relationship but does not intimate. Moreover, the photographer records the life and state of the model, but can’t describe the essence behind the photo. So when she was fourteen, she chose to escape from the home, where was rigid, stubborn, false and serious, to formed a new “Utopia family” with a group of young people who lived on the edge of society and loved the hippie culture. Most of these young people are artists and writers who despised traditional bourgeois life, indulged in alcohol, drugs and sex. They never live for others.

s Self Portrait Writing my Diary, Boston MA (1989) foregrounds the connection between verbal and visual self-writing; how does the much-vaunted kinship between verbal diary and visual diary work in the case of Goldin and to what extent is the analogy between verbal and visual autobiography pertinent in her case? To answer those questions, I will examine what the term self-portraiture means with respect to Goldin’s work, and then analyze the way the construction of her work is akin to verbal autobiography. To conclude, I will bring out Goldin’s aim in creating works like The Ballad of Sexual Dependency which I propose to consider as an extended self-portrait. I. Mon semblable, ma sœur In 2007 Goldin won the prestigious Hasselblad Award. In 2010 the Louvre commissioned a slideshow and exhibition; Goldin titled it Scopophilia and intermixed her own images with those of historical works in the museum’s collections (from figures in Greek mythology to Rembrandt, Delacroix, and beyond)—drawing direct connections between depictions of desire, sexuality, gender, and violence over thousands of years. Arbus’ young man in curlers is relaxed as well. But the mood is different. Like Jimmy Paulette, he is not dressed yet and he’s in between his masculine and soon-to-be feminine expressions of self. Arbus is prodding at his psyche. She’s investigating the young man’s liminal state within his own state of becoming. She’s curious about him, but she is less invested in his authentic self than his naked self. Is an investment in one better than the other? It does raise questions about authenticity and intention, but the world of documentary photography is full of practitioners who have their own agendas.At 14, afraid she would suffer the same fate as her sister, Goldin ran away from home. She discovered photography while living in foster homes in the Boston area. At school she met David Armstrong, the first person she photographed and the one who started calling her Nan. They moved together into a row house in Boston with four other roommates, and as Armstrong started performing in drag, Goldin became enamored of the drag queens and their lives, seeing them as a “third gender that made more se

Including our parents, the mass media has nurtured us, made us social, gave us entertainment, comforted us, it deceived us, and bound us, telling us what to do, what should not to do. In the process of transforming us from a woman of personality to the same person, it plays the most critical role: through American printing presses, projectors and TV channels, it shapes us into traditionally good women and bad women. For the female concept, these are already the most important legacy of the public media: put all the neatness into one. ” Sartorius, Joachim. “Deep Pictures of Us All”. I’ll Be Your Mirror. New York : Whitney Museum of Art, 1996. In 1989 Goldin curated the first art exhibition in New York about AIDS, “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.” Mounted at Artists Space, it included work by Armstrong, diCorcia, Lankton, Morrisroe, Peter Hujar, Vittorio Scarpati, Kiki Smith, and David Wojnarowicz. “I am often filled with rage at my sense of powerlessness in the face of this plague,” Goldin wrote in one of the show catalogue’s essays. “I want to empower others by providing them a forum to voice their grief and anger in the hope that this public ritual of mourning can be cathartic in the process of recovery, both for those among us who are ill and those survivors who are left behind.” with Rembrandt and Courbet, we find in Goldin’s œuvre a number of portraits of the artist in the frame with her friends, notably Nan and Brian in Bed (1983) the picture of the artist and Brian , her toxic lover chosen for the cover of The Ballad. However, the basic tenet of the œuvre of Nan Goldin is, I would argue, that even when the artist herself is not represented, most works, and especially those in The Ballad, lean towards the self-portrait. Goldin is representing herself through what she has called her family. In other words, Gina, Gilles, Suzanne, Brian, Dieter, Cookie, Ryan, and Mark, these specific others with whom she identifies are her “tribe” (Armstrong and Keller 454) and are part of herself. The result is that whether a photograph is of Nan or of one or some of her friends, the viewer’s experience is like that of the reader of a verbal autobiography when presented with the significant figures in the author’s life story. The viewer and reader are “privy to the author’s sense of self” and of what constitutes her identity, a sense of oneself performed and often theatricalized by the mirror (Armstrong and Keller 449).The United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s was experiencing the emancipation of the mind. Women’s Liberation Movement, Sexual Liberation Movement, Ecstasy Culture, Hippies, and Anti-war Movement, etc, have emerged in the United States. At same time, the hippie culture of the West Coast changed the attitudes and ways of life of young Americans, and in the frenzy of sexual liberation, a large number of LGBT groups began to respond. They abandon the secular ethical constraints, liberate themselves, admire freedom, that deeply attract Nan Goldin, who runs counter to traditional class thinking. Just as Goldin’s career was taking off, she fell deeper and deeper into drug addiction. “The party was over but I couldn’t stop,” she said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. “I stayed shut up in my loft snorting drugs, going months without seeing daylight.” She entered a rehab clinic outside Boston and got sober in 1988. When she returned to New York, she found that many of her friends had contracted AIDS.

Lejeune, Philippe, Catherine Bogaert. Le journal intime : histoire et anthologie. Paris : Textuel, 2006. In her photos, everything is real and there are no fictional elements. “I don’t like the forged world, we need the real world, so we need photography as evidence to tell us the truth,” Golding said. Goldin was born in Washington in 1953. Her work began to emerge in the New York of the 1980s, when the artist was in her early thirties. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, the work that founded Goldin’s place in contemporary art (“The thing that sustains my name,” MoCA) began as an ever-changing slide show projected by the artist herself in underground clubs in New York and around the world. Sound was added in 1980 and the work received its name in 1981 from a song in Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera. In 1985, it was reviewed in the Village Voice and presented at the Whitney Biennial; it reached its definitive form, running for 48 minutes with over 700 pictures and with 30 songs, in 1987. That year it was also shown during the Rencontres de la photographie in the Roman theatre in Arles. Goldin’s work began to be exhibited in France in the early 1990s, first by Agnès b. and then by Yvon Lambert whose gallery she joined in 1995. Lambert chose Goldin and other artists working with photography precisely because she was not a photographer, but an artist using photography: “I’ve always supported the work of that generation which called themselves artists, and used photography as one medium among others, by reinventing it. People like Louise Lawler, Andres Serrano…” (Ibars 67).left: Nan Goldin, “Jimmy Paulette and Tabboo in the Bathroom, NYC, 1991” right: Diane Arbus, “A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966” Goldin had her first solo show in 1973 at Project, Inc. in Boston. The following year she and Armstrong enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (as did Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe, who would go on to successful careers of their own); after graduating she moved with a group of friends first to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then to New York. Goldin had found her “extended family.” With her sister still at the forefront of her mind, she “became obsessed with never losing the memory of anyone again,” she said in I’ll Be Your Mirror. It was this that drove her to constantly photograph members of what she called her tribe.