Video: Nan Goldin trades drug addicts and transvestites for parents and babies in new photo book "Eden and After"
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
A series of photographs "Eden and After" by the famous New York photographer Nan Goldin addresses the theme of childhood, without excessive sentimentality showing how the first sprouts of imagination, sympathy, loneliness and curiosity hatch in little people.
When Nan Goldin was 12 years old, her family, then living in Boston, suffered tragedy. Elder 18-year-old sister Nan committed suicide. The psychiatrist, to whom the parents sent their youngest daughter, told the girl to take the same account. To escape the oppressive atmosphere of a crumbling home, or maybe just a teenage spirit of rebellion, she ran away from home and went on a journey through the bohemian world of nightclubs, promiscuity, alcohol and drugs.
Nan took her first photographs at her sister's funeral. She later recalled that these pictures helped her to determine her own place on the confusing path between birth and death. Critics, who greeted the first major exhibition of Goldin with great enthusiasm, dubbed her the term "raw insider" (raw - raw, unprocessed; insider - your own, not an outsider) for the characteristic sense of the "instant" of photographs and defiantly personal, on the verge of exhibitionism, themes and plots, the heroes of which were mainly members of her family, friends and lovers.
Almost half a century later, Goldin managed to surprise the art world again, which had already become thoroughly accustomed to images of lust, suffering, dark passions, and all kinds of addictions, by releasing a book with children's photographs.
Goldin's new series of photographs, entitled "Eden and After", brings together the thrilling moments of nascent life (from pregnancy to early adolescence), paying attention not only to the highly traditional idealized images of happiness and unconditional parental love, but also the themes of loneliness, confusion and helplessness, which appear much less often in it.
Instead of sugary-sentimental images of the spiritualized shine in the eyes of the expectant mother, paternal pride from what they have done, ruddy cheeks, pink heels and moments of perfect harmony, Goldin offers viewers a sincere and ambiguous portrait of childhood, showing how little people still at the stage of personality formation interact with their families, friends, the world around them and their inner world. In other words, children's photos very rarely want to be called "respectful", but, perhaps, in this case, such an epithet sounds quite organic.
And one of Goldin's old photographs recently received a new interpretation, thanks to the Englishwoman Eleanor McNair, who sculpts replicas of famous photographs from Play-Doh children's plasticine sets.
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