Nan Goldin
Self-portrait in bed with Siobhan, NYC
Self-portrait in bed with Siobhan, NYC, 1990
Cibachrome, 69.5 x 101.5 cm
Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur, gift Andreas Reinhart
1999-008-017
© Nan Goldin
b. 1953 (Washington, US), lives and works in New York, US
Nan Goldin’s photographs tell stories of the bonds between people, of friendship, love and sexuality, while also speaking of violence, grief and loss. Beginning in the 1970s, she regularly took pictures of friends and acquaintances, as well as self-portraits, capturing her subjects (herself included) in intimate and vulnerable moments, viewed with an empathic yet unsparing gaze. Her work often featured close associates like photographer David Armstrong and actress and writer Cookie Mueller, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989. Goldin would organise her photos – many of them accented by intense colours and harsh flash lighting – into narrative sequences, which she presented as slideshows with musical accompaniment. One such sequence formed the basis for her best-known work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which was published as a book in 1986. In her autobiographical documentation of private and intimate scenes, Goldin also tackles pressing contemporary themes with a social dimension, such as the realities faced by queer and gender-fluid people, the HIV epidemic of the 1980s and the opioid crisis of the 1990s. Goldin is bracketed together with artists like Mark Morrisroe and Philip-Lorca diCorcia as part of the informal Boston School of Photography.
Depot Tuesday - Focus on narrative documentary photography
The first cycle of the depot tour had a spotlight on the documentary-narrative photographs of Nan Goldin (*1953) from the 1980s. The Fotomuseum Winterthur owns around 100 Cibachromes, most of them portraits, by the US American photo artist. This so-called silver dye bleaching process was used to produce film slides on photographic paper from 1964 and was discontinued in 2011. The appearance of Cibachromes is unique, which is why they were very popular with photo artists.
But what exactly distinguishes Cibachromes as «unique»? What challenges do they pose for the Fotomuseum Winterthur? What needs to be taken into account when conserving them? Other colour photography processes by other artists, such as Joel Sternfeld (*1944) and William Eggleston (*1939), as well as black-and-white portraits by other contemporaries of Goldin, such as Peter Hujar (1934-1987), will be shown in comparison.
Also the history of the collection works was part of the discussion: How can her works be classified in terms of photo history and what do they have to do with fashion photography from the 1990s? All these questions and many more will be answered in the Depot Tuesday tour by the collection curator, Patrizia Munforte, and the art handler, Andrea Hadem, in the collection depot of the Fotomuseum Winterthur.
