The beauty of life’s ambiguity

And then we knew for a fact that it was happening – it was not just feeble talk. Terje Bringedal and his colleagues in the Society of Norwegian Press Photographers had succeeded where others had failed.

When I meet Nan Goldin, she has just returned from the second screening of her celebrated slide show ”The ballad of sexual dependency” at the international festival of documentary photography, dok10 in Oslo. Two days in a row, a packed auditorium has felt Goldin's visual nerves up-close and personal. Like stuffed sardines in a too-small tin, our eyes and ears have had a sensory experience of a lifetime. The 42 thematic chapters in the slide show ”The ballad of sexual dependency" has thundered through the room, to an audience holding their breath.

-Those two screenings were really very different, right? - Nan is not feeling sure about day two. The hotel room where we are seated is dimly lit. Nan Goldin-lit. The world’s first - and still greatest, avant-garde queen of art photography is exhausted after intense days in the Norwegian capital. Yet, the agreement about interview still stands. She is firm about that. – I am sorry you had to wait. Are you okay? Goldin offers me a cigarette. With a swift movement she lights one for herself. – Yes, those were two totally different days. Because I was in a very different mood. And I can only do what I can do. Last night I was in a really gregarious, funny mood. Today I was in a very low key one. People have different sides, you know. Last night I was feeling like my party side or my kind of performer side. I like to be on stage and talk to people. Yesterday there was lot of energy. Today the energy was very low key. They were two very different talks, but they both worked. I liked them both.

Truly, those were two very different experiences. There was a magic moment when Harald Birkevold from the Norwegian newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad was facilitating the conversation on stage with Nan Goldin after the screening.

– The vibes between you and Harald could be felt among the audience. It was like you had a thing going on up there on the stage, you and Harald. – Oh yes, Harald. I never met anyone like Harald before. That man really is wonderful. He reminds me of Johnny Carson. Being on stage having that conversation with him, I felt like I was on Carson’s show. Yes, he is lovely, Harald.

-To Norwegian photographs, it was almost surreal to imagine you being here for dok10 in Oslo, a small city almost invisible on the world map. – Really? Well, you know, I don´t feel like a big deal anymore – like I say, I am the artist formerly known as Nan Goldin. I am not a big star in the art world anymore, maybe in photo world I am, but not in the art world, a lot has changed in the last few years.

-Maybe you don´t see it that way yourself, but many people still view you as an important artist with much influence. - You know, the status of artists come and go. I realize I am no longer considered as one of the really important artists .I am not a star in the art world anymore.

She lights another cigarette. Her assistant Fred brings her a salmon sandwich. Starving, she has asked for something to eat after the day’s performance. Ten minutes into our conversation, she is totally focused on the interview. The salmon will have to wait. As a tiny compensation, I offer her a bag of liquorice – Thank you so much! Oh, I love liquorice! So the word is out? We both laugh. Yes, the word is out, definitely. Terje Bringedal and Harald Birkevold both share anecdotes about liquorice, Nan Goldin and Oslo. Liquorice is hot with the legendary photo artist. The moment is golden.

If you Google Nan Goldin you will get something like 250-300 000 hits. Common facts about her career and her artistic production can be found on Wikipedia. For those who were present at the screenings at dok10, we also learned a few other things in addition. Like that she enjoys travelling, that she feels a connection to Scandinavia and to Sweden, and that she experiences a strong bond to the Swedish photographers Christer Strömholm and Anders Petersen. That she no longer can stand her own images from the ballad work. It makes her too sad. There are too many of those we meet there, who are now dead. Aids. Overdoses. Nan Goldin takes photographs from fear of loss. Life has taken many of those who helped themselves to it, and whom stood her close. A kind of destined symmetry. The journey from those days till today must have been quite an expedition.

- Is it possible for you to describe the journey you have had, from being a just a teenager, not knowing anything about the world of art photography, just being compelled to take pictures of those you loved, to suddenly being a famous art photographer and a diva in the art world?

- Oh it was so much fun you can’t imagine. I still feel completely comfortable if I walk into a drag bar anywhere in the world. I went to Sao Paolo to some exhibition. I was given an assignment by a magazine to photograph the gay bar drag community, and this particular bar – and I walk in and it´s like home -. Same in Bangkok, in Manilla, same as in the nineties when I went there. Those are probably the places where I am the most comfortable. The magazine wanted me to do a story – of course - from the favelas in the town, the poor neighborhoods, and there was no way cause I won’t photograph anyone I don´t want to live with. That is – I would like to live with them, but I don´t think they would want me in their world. It is heavily controlled with drug dealing and extremely violent. I had no place there, and I would have had to spend like months before I could photograph there. The people who gave me the assignment, they wanted me to do it just like a drive through shooting through protected windows – hideous, so of course I did not do it! I would never do something like that, never.

It strikes me that Nan Goldin seems to have a delicate awareness of her own and others roles, and for where the limits and boundaries are. Maybe that is why it has been possible for her to see others the way she has – along with herself? The feeling of Goldin’s sensitivity as an artist and as a human being is powerful, as we face each other in this moment. Her reflections concerning her past are as dense with the mix of existential melancholy and raw realism, as her images from that époque are.

- When it started, I was very naive, and you can never go back to that – you can fake it but you can never go back to that. A lot of people’s best work is when they are naive, and my father still thinks that’s the best work I ever did.

When Nan Goldin was 15, her older sister committed suicide. Nan left home and picked up photography at the same time. She has explained later on, that this became her rescue and her way to cope with the loss of her sister.

- I lived with the queens for three or four years, and I lived as a queen. I mean I really felt like a queen myself. I did not analyze what that meant in terms of what gender I was, I was just a queen. I photographed my friends and I photographed the other queens. It was my whole life, and it wasn’t till I went to photo school that I had any distance from it or it became any kind of project. When I finally went to the museum-school, they wanted me to go back and photograph that of course, so I went back there with a wide angle lens and a flash… and those pictures, I don’t like them, no it wasn´t my place anymore and the way I photographed them wasn’t the way I would have liked to photograph them. They liked the pictures, which were flattering to me, but it was not the same.

For many years, Nan Goldin photographed without aiming at becoming an artist. To her, her images were a form of visual diary. - I would say my career started in 1978. The reason I started doing slideshows is I was at this art school that’s now become very proper and prestigious, but was very wild and pretty loose at that time. I was put into advanced photography class, and I started doing the slideshows.

- I started to get some recognition there, but not so much from the outside world as within the world in Boston. I got this grant of 5000 dollars, which at that time was a lot for me, and I went to London and I had probably the wildest time of my life . I lived with skinheads, I slept on the streets, and I stayed in fancy hotels.

Did she pursue this wilderness? - No, it was just a part of me, that time, Nan says. - I would see people on the street that I liked and I just followed them.This was the time of The clash, in the vital time of punk.

Then the money ran out. Nan Goldin went back to the States, this time to New York. She made a living doing anything and everything, mostly working in bars. In one of these bars, in Times Square, she met a woman who would become important to her in her future development as a photographer and as an artist. – This was in the period where Times Square was a really tough place. Pimps and prostitutes dominated the scene. Then I met this very special woman in this bar where I worked. She was engaged in all kinds of things, in human rights for everyone. She stood up for the prostitutes, for the homeless people, the criminals. She had a huge impact on my work, she was very supportive. She was in fact the one who first articulated the political aspects of my work and I became more and more aware of the political aspects myself because of this.

Early in the eighties, the future icon of art photo started travelling Europe with her sideshow. She would earn around 300 US dollars per screening. She met people, got to know new environments and continued to document her life-experiences through her photographs. Her raw biographical disclosure and the strikingly poetic stories of her images were noticed. In 1986 Apterture offered her a book contract. It took her 6 months to finish the book. When it finally was ready for press, Nan Goldin was completely strung out on drugs.

- How was it, holding the book in your hands, seeing your personal life being materialized into a book like that? – When the book came out, I wasn´t allowed to go on press, because it was in Hong Kong. I closed the doors, I did not listen to my answering machine, and I did not leave my room. I just did drugs, I became more and more isolated from everyone.

As part of the process of making the book, Goldin was interviewed about her life story. - I guess the whole story of my life is somewhere on tape. We ended up working for a long time to pare it down the four pages that is the beginning of the ballad. That text is really important to me. I started writing as a kid, so writing has always been important to me.

Did she ever imagine the future recognition that she as a person and personality, and her work would receive? - No, Nan Goldin answers, and lights another cigarette. In the low light from the lamp by the chair where she is sitting, I can see that she is still a very beautiful woman. In spite of a rough life from one extreme experience to another, her splendor is still there. In the intense look, in the fine facial features, in the silence when she is searching for the right word. Like in this very moment, before she finally answers. – I had no idea how my life would be. -When I was a kid I wanted to visit every country in the world, and I wanted to be famous, but my idea of fame had nothing to do with what fame is today, not a celebrity, but wanted to make a mark on the world. I wanted to make a difference.

- Do you feel like you have been doing that?

- I think I did, – to me it was all about changing what was allowed and not allowed in photography to a certain extent. I think I was the first one to put out a book like that (The ballad of sexual dependency). There is no historical memory anymore. In articles today I am often mentioned alongside younger people, which makes me think people don’t remembered that I was the first one. – But that’s something I am really proud of, that I broke the rules of photography.

You are considered a pioneer within your genre of photography. Many will associate you with that. - Yes, I was the first one in America, I guess Araki was doing the same thing in Japan, but I did not know him until much later, and also there was much difference to the motivation in his work.

It was after rehab that Nan Goldin started having exhibitions and subsequently experienced her breakthrough as an artist. - I got a grant and I moved to Berlin, and I saw this show in Dresden, and it changed my way of looking at how art should be installed. I went back to a New York biennale and made an installation, that was 1992, and then suddenly the art world wanted me.

Art dealers and galleries chased her. Limousines from airport to airport. Finally, Matthew Mark got her in his stall, introduced her to the international art world and transformed Goldin’s status from being a photographer to being an art photographer. – I moved back to New York, and my career really took off.
That kind of life lasted for years, it got bigger and bigger. I had a mid-career retrospective in 1996, and in 2001 I did a big travelling exhibition that started at the Reina Sofie in Madrid, and was also shown at Pompadou in Paris. Those were the glory days.

The success has not been taken for granted. Nan Goldin has been just as deep down in the dark valley as she has been surfing the waves of fame. – Life is not an upward trajectory . It´s a really bumpy ride. Now she is experiencing a long stretched speed bump. She feels out-dated. She is no longer in the spotlight of the art worlds. Yet original prints signed Goldin are sold for 40 000 US dollars on the internet.

The photographer behind the eternal portraits of underground avantgardist in the eighties is now doing commercial assignments. The magazine Kids Wear Magazine is one of her clients. In company with colleagues like Martin Parr, Shelby Lee Adams, Anton Corbijn and Bruce Gilden, the audience is still a rather exclusive one.

How does she experience photographing children? – During your visit here in Oslo I have heard you talk warmly about how you nowadays appreciate working with children and have that as a project. The psychotherapist and author Virginia Satir has talked about the art of seeing children, that for a child, the experience of really being seen and recognized by another human being can make a difference for the experience of worth and self esteem. How do you view your impact in your encounters with the children you work with in your photography? Do you think that you can have such an influence on them and contribute to their lives, by seeing them through your camera?

- I never thought of it that way. Virginia Satir? Would you write down her name for me? That was beautifully said. Did she also write? In that case, I would really like to read it. Yes - I love working with these children, and I know that when we are together and I photograph them, I can make them feel really good and we have a great time. Many of the kids will ask me if we can do more shootings, so I guess they like it. And I like it, too. Kids Wear is also a really great magazine. I can be creative and do my own stuff, which I like.

My golden minutes with Goldin are coming to an end. Outside the hotel suite in Oslo the trams are drumming to and from the national hospital. Nan Goldin tells me she is surprised that she is still so sought after in the photo world. - In Scandinavia photography is really respected. That´s really great. I still miss being part of the art world. At the same time, I know there are others and perhaps more important thing to life.

- What do you feel is important in your life right now? - If I can affect people and they can influence me - that´s the important thing to keep open. What else is there of importance to me? My father who is 96 now, and my Swedish nephew who is 26 and one of my favourite persons in the world. Travelling, meeting people, which is also something that means a lot to me. Yet, I am at a point in my own life right now where I talk about things I dream about doing, things I don´t do now. I would like to be doing them, though.

- What do you dream about doing? - What I really, really want to do now, - and I have wanted it for about 10 years, is to join this man named Dr. Paul Farmer. He has been among the most radical and effective persons in the world on AIDS. He raised the first AIDS-clinic in Siberia, Peru and South Africa, to help the sick people and the local communities there. I respect his work tremendously.

Nan Goldin dreams about going to Africa with Farmer. – When I think about this, I sometimes tell myself; fuck the art world. Perhaps the biggest dream is to go to Africa and contribute to the world, to make a difference. This man, Dr Farmer, he is incredible. Every time I do a show or show my work in a gallery, I insist on a very inexpensive edition, so that the people who supported me way before the rich and famous, can buy some of my work for cheap. I send the money to him, to support Dr Farmer’s projects. That´s my way of paying back.

Time is up. Liquorice. Salmon sandwich. Tram drumming and the dream of making a difference. The beauty of life’s ambiguity. So perishable and at the same time so ceaseless. We are all familiar with the extremities of, which can be so irreconcilable, even if the radius to most of us will be of more humble proportions than Nan Goldin’s. With her images she has opened up for the possibility of viewing ourselves, through the fascination and fear over the other, over what is terrifying because it is so close, so vulnerable, so valuable.

I´ll be your mirror, reflect who you are, in case you don´t know. First part of the text reads chapter two in Goldin’s “The ballad of sexual dependency”, and is the heading of everyone's lives when it comes to it. Without the other breathing next to us we are nobody and nothing. Without the other seeing us are we invisible. Where Goldin has seen through her camera, hers and others lives have set mark. In us. The good, the bad and the ugly. A strongly affected audience has recently shown us this. See and be seen- live and let live; this is what give us our memories. Or as Goldin self ends her visual power ballade: Memories are made of this.