Through her work you can see how it starts out with a positive energy because all these people are in the same situation by taking drugs having unprotected sex and having a fun time being free from parents and having very little to worry about. They were experimenting with drugs and also their sexual preferences. In the photos that Nan was taking she is obviously very close to her subjects and a lot of the time if the people in her photographs were taking drugs, having sex or laughing she was doing the same. So by her being in the same situations she is able to get this close and be a part of the images she is taking.
Goldin and her friends
were trying to get clean and even more important they were coming to terms with
member of her communal style family being diagnosed with the HIV virus. Goldin
did what she did best and photographed her friends as slowly more and more of
them were being tested positive. She would document how Aids would attack the
human body and what affect it had on loved ones. All the way through her life
you can see these friends of hers and you begin to get use to seeing these
people although you don’t get to know them through the photographs you get comfortable
seeing them. Then out of nowhere you they are in a hospital bed or photos of a
funeral and then the photos of them just stop as she carries on photographing
her life.
Figure 1 Gotscho kissing Gilles, Paris, France. 1993. Nan Goldin Phaidon. P. 78
The image above is just one of many of Goldin’s friends that past away
from Aids. In the photograph you can see a males lover kissing his face on his
deathbed. Although these times were difficult for Goldin as well it was clear
by these more emotional images nothing would stop her documenting her life,
even the deaths of her friends were not to be missed out in her archive of
snapshots.
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