When photographer Nan Goldin appeared on the art scene in the late 1970s, her tough, autobiographical frankness quickly established her in an all-male field of diaristic photographers. The beaten-down and beaten-up personages that populate Goldin’s work are icons deeply inscribed onto the viewer’s collective memory. WithVariety: Photographs by Nan Goldin, you have a compilation of Goldin’s still photographs created for director Bette Gordon’s now infamous 1983 independent film, Variety. Thi film, and the photographs in particular, provide a window into the collision of music, club life, and art production that colored the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and is an important addition to Nan Goldin’s oeuvre.
The images offer a rare glimpse into this artist’s symbiotic working process and the influence of filmmaking on Goldin’s approach, hovering as they do unsettlingly between fiction and reality, “documentary style” and art photography.
150 b/w and color illustrations
10 x 10 inches
Skira Rizzoli 2009
