Product Description

This is a major collection of photographs by Nan Goldin, representing over 35 years' work. This significant body of work begins in the early 1970s with her "Dazzle Bag" portraits and her series of photographs on themes of maternity, family and landscapes. The book contains Goldin's new and recent photographs in narrative and thematic sequences such as "Landscapes", "Self-portraits", "Maternity, Heartbeat" (2001), "My French Family" (1999-2001) and "57 days" (2000), many of which are previously unpublished. It also contains some of the "drag queen" photos of the mid-1990s, the "Cookie Mueller" portfolio of 1989 and the "Ballad of Sexual Dependency" images from the 1980s. Goldin's early black-and-white photographs from the Boston years in the 1970s also form part of this substantial collection. Nan Goldin's photographs are intimate and compelling - they tell personal stories of relationships, friendships and identity, but at the same time chronicle different eras and the passage of time. Their subject matter ranges from drag queens and AIDS to the family, maternity and most recently, nature and landscapes. Laid out in chronological sequences by the artist, like a diary, the material is both candid and affirmative. In addition, a number of short essays are interspersed throughout the photographic sequences. Individually, these texts discuss different aspects or themes in Nan Goldin's work such as the narrative, love and gender politics, while also referencing particular works such as the "Ballad of Sexual Dependency" (1981-96). A conversation between the artist and Catherine Lampert, freelance curator, former director of the Whitechapel and close friend of Goldin, touches on the sources of her inspiration and her life as a prominent artist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #379156 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 504 pages

Customer Reviews

Exhaustive !!
As the above review says this is an extensive collection of Nan Goldins work. The quality of the book and reproduction is up too the usual standards of Phaidon releases and will not disapoint.
Nan Goldins confessional style is displayed well. The majority of the images work best viewed as shown here as part of a total work, not many work as stand alone images.
The themes are exhausting, I felt as though I was being dragged into her life and felt physicaly drained but couldnt stop.
A moving experience.

A genius
This is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary artist. Quite how the previous reviewer can state that few of the images stand alone is beyond me: time and again Goldin finds sacred in the profane, beauty in ugliness, tenderness in extremis. Nan Goldin fashions the sublime from the everyday; she finds salvation in a godless world through intimacy and trust. Of course, in the context of major social changes over the last 30 years, Goldin's work has enormous political -- as well as artistic -- resonance. On the face of it, Nan Goldin is a documentary photographer -- she works with natural light, her photographs are unstaged, her subjects 'real people' (in fact, her extended family). And yet the editing -- which is one of many strokes of brilliance in this book -- is anything but accidental; composition is extraordinary; nuance infinitely affecting.

Nan Goldin is a genius. And short of another major retrospective at the Whitechapel or a restaging of Ballad at Tate Modern, this is currently the closest we can get to the heart of a great artist.