BLOG 3 >SELECTED ARTWORK --NAN GOLDIN

Nan Goldin (born 1953)
Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a taxi, NYC
1991
Photograph, colour, Cibachrome print, on paper mounted onto board
Dimensions
image: 695 x 1015 mm


She began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the Bowery's hard-drug subculture; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. These snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug overdose or AIDS; this tally included close friends and often-photographed subjects Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller.

This is a large colour photograph of two drag queens known as Misty and Jimmy Paulette. Goldin has photographed them close-up, sitting next to each other inside a taxi. They are framed against the taxi's rear and side windows, through which other yellow New York taxis are visible. The drag queens stare directly at Goldin's camera, aimed at them from the taxi's front seat. They are cropped just below breast level. The camera's flash has illuminated and accentuated their heavy makeup and shiny clothes. Misty wears a light blue wig, big heart-shaped silver earrings and a pvc-textured sleeveless top stretched tight over large fake breasts. Jimmy Paulette's costume includes a streaked blonde wig, a white stretchy-net top and a gold bra, the straps of which have fallen off his shoulders. White padding visible in one of the bra cups and two large holes in the front of the white net confer a sleazy edge to this glamour.

Godlin with his camera shows a world not to be accepted in the world, but she showed them their beauty, and want to tell them that he is willing to accept their lifestyle. Surrounds them, dressed in glamorous social life in order to live the fantasy rebuilding identity, he felt they made ​​a real self, which is their choice of lifestyle. This filled with drugs, a third gender. She recalled: "I ​​met a whole new crowd in New York in 1990, I took my new friend after many years of experience and continue to shoot both sexes with their codes and definitions and their difficulties, about each other's struggles this is liberation, in order to meet these people have crossed the boundaries of gender. "