Nan Goldin (1953). My work is based on memory. For me it is essential to have a memory of those who stood by me, to have them live on.

It is difficult, indeed literally impossible, to separate the Nan Goldin photographer from the Nan Goldin woman. Her photographs are almost like those of a family photo album with the difference that to be immortalized are not  birthday parties or graduation ceremonies, but equally significant moments, stolen from everyday life. A daily life not necessarily conventional, even lived in those environments that common decency tends to relegate to the last corner of the world. And it's just here that Goldin's object-glass arrives, moved by the desire to remember fragments of life.

 

The photographer is never far from his subjects, indeed she is part of their world, to the point that she is often the protagonist of her own shots. Gilles, Brian, Robert are her friends, brothers, companions of a life full of happy moments and many dark moments, difficult to overcome and cope with. Especially if you live in America in the seventies or eighties and gradually lose, because of drugs or AIDS, many fellow travelers often still too young to have lived life to the full. Unlike Diane Arbus, of whom she shares certain themes, Nan Goldin never distance herself from those on the other side of the camera; the object-glass is not a filter but almost disappears due to the great intimacy between the photographer and her subjects, about whom she said: "I'm not a stranger. This is my party. This is my family, my history."

 

To understand how Goldin herself is a fundamental part of the world she portrays and how each shot hides a long, unbreakable chain of bonds and common experiences - just remember that her most famous collection, and certainly among the most successful, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, had a gestation period of almost thirty years: the first photos date back from the late seventies but the book was published in 2005 and its primary purpose is to preserve the memory of friends who lived with her in the Lower East Side. Therefore it is a work with a strong personal value: the title of each photo indicates names, dates and places where it was taken. Such situations are chronologically and geographically well-defined, specific and contingent; yet those shots can also unleash a universal power and value.

 

The observer is confronted with a work of Nan Goldin with no embarrassment: the photographer's psychological and sometimes physical participation allow in a sense the viewer to enter into that world. It is about scenes conveying so much a sense of real life that a direct relationship of empathy and identification between the subject and the viewer is established: "I want to show exactly how my world is, without embellishment and glorification. It's not a depressing world, but one in which there is an awareness of pain."