Artchipel

Thanks to proustitute for this Tumblr Monday to introduce the work of Nan Goldin. As Goldin writes of her photography in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986):

“People in the pictures say my camera is as much a part of being with me as any other aspect of knowing me. It’s as if my hand were a camera. If it were possible, I’d want no mechanism between me and the moment of photographing. (…) There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing: this is my party. This is my family, my history.”

“My desire is to preserve the sense of peoples’ lives, to endow them with the strength and beauty I see in them. I want the people in my pictures to stare back. I want to show exactly what my world looks like, without glamorization, without glorification. This is not a bleak world but one in which there is an awareness of pain, a quality of introspection.”