"I'm a snapshot photographer": Nan Goldin

<p>http://www.ubu.com/film/goldin_life.html</p>

<p>"I've photographed the same people for 25 years...never believed in the single image...much more related to film than to still photography..frustrated film maker..." "related to Schiele...Munsch..." "...Faulkner...Cassavetes.."</p>

<p>"empathy...deep" Vs "narcissm & voyeurism" </p>

<p>"..celebration.." "...loss.." "...struggle of gender.." "..my subjects are not victims..." "...they're staring at you" "...no window..." "...AIDS.." "...keep people alive through my photographs..."</p>

<p>No BS. Golden knows who she is, has always done what she does. Shares her understanding of photography, beauty, her upbringing, relationships, life's work, her process, her color. (btw I don't "like" her work: "liking" is an ego trip).</p>

<p><br />Did what you did as a kid lead directly to what you do today? How?</p>

<p>Let's talk about us: Goldin doesn't need us, she speaks for herself. </p>

<p>instersting and a well know NY photorapher<br>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nan_Goldin</p>

<blockquote>

<p>btw I don't "like" her work: "liking" is an ego trip ... Let's talk about us</p>

</blockquote>

<p>My ironometer is going into the red zone, John. Is <em>not</em> liking something an ego trip? Is making a point of saying that you don't indulge in ego trips itself an ego trip?<br /><br />Yes, the way you're raised and the activities you pursue while your brain is in important developmental stages does impact what you do later, and how, and why. </p>

<p> </p>

<p>Don't we all speak for ourseves, John?<br>

I had not heard of Nan Goldin before your post, but I did watch the video and enjoyed it, but found no deep meaning in it for me personally.<br>

What I did as a child was just that. What I do as a man is my free choice. One can rise above one's beginnings.</p>

<p>John did not want a discussing on Nan Goldin so I will not go down that road - although she is surely worth it, liking or not liking her art-snap-shots (that are anything but snapshots, by the way).<br>

<em>Did what you did as a kid lead directly to what you do today? How?, </em><br>

Nothing leads <strong>directly</strong> from childhood to adult life. There are too many crossroads, <em>roadworks, red and yellow light, </em>dead-ends and roundabouts, underway. Goldin's middleclass background, her sisters suicide, her school in Boston, her bi-sexuality, her drug and alcohol misuse, her friends and lovers are all cornerstones in understanding her artworks (as she explains frequently herself). References to the works and life of Schiele, his pedophilia (drawings) or maybe Munch (I'm not convinced) are cases of comparable adult lifes (marginal and bohemian life styles) especially) and artistic expressions, but not of comparable child background as far as I can see. (sorry I came back to Goldin despite John's wishes.<br>

No, personally I don't see such direct links between childhood and adult photographical work. I see much closer link between higher education interests and specializations, student lifestyles and especially professional and political engagements during adult years, and what I do in the field of photography (not to mention writing, oral expression and painting). </p>

<p>Anders, you have written a wonderful critique.<br>

For myself, I have a new appreciation and undersanding of Nan Goldin's work, and find much of it extremely beautiful, despite (or because of) the subject matter (or both at once).<br>

She has an amazing palette, too, and as she explains, she takes LOTS of photos but editing from what must be an enormous trove of photos is critical. She brings photographic intimacy to a new level, (or did at the time this older documentary was made, and undoubtedly still does. I wish I had seen this ten years ago. <br>

Bravo for posting it.<br>

john<br>

John (Crosley)</p>

<p> Amazing lady, honest about who she is and what she is doing. I am very glad to see this vidio. I find her photos a bit disturbing but I can see the power in what she is showing. I second the "bravo". She brought a new meaning to the word "snapshot" for me.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Ross, if we are indeed to discuss Nan Goldin, "<em>the new meaning to the word "snapshot" </em>is more a wider definition of what is a shot. In the video, and elsewhere, she does click "snapshots" but she also heavily engaged in editing and selecting photos for print. The whole photographical process that leads to one of her photos on a wall is therefore complex and lengthy and anything but a snap of the fingers. </p>

<p>By the way,if you wish to discuss artists like Nan Godin, there are other contemporary artist attached to an expressionist tradition (Munch, Schiele) like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracey_Emin">Tracey Emin</a>. Same violence of expression, narcism, socially messed up child background: raped at 13 and bigamist father etc. She is of British, Turkish, Cypriot origin. She works with all possible media, including photography. Her life is her art, like Nan Godin.</p>

<p>Goldin has a different meaning of snapshot than Anders'. There are people who shoot in the snapshot <em>style, like Eggleston. </em>Goldin is shooting in the snapshot <em>concept. </em>She is photographing her family. Their lives, the major events in it, documenting them, and doing so, in part, as mnemonic fetishes. I saw a Goldin print yesterday evening, of a friend of hers in Venice, looking at a distant light. An unorthodox Goldin, but like her landscapes, quite strong, brilliantly conceived, unabashedly romantic, but not very sentimental. Blurry, and superb. </p>

<p>Anders, as far as violence, it's the coin of the realm for a huge percentage of people in this world. Those who aren't fluent in it and living nice, predictable, conventional consumerist lives are the fortunate ones. As the song goes, to sing the blues, you've got to live the blues.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>As a young child I was taught by my mother that photography was an important activity (that's the main thing about it for me today). She was heavily influenced by Minicam Magazine (I have negs and a few fine prints and Anscochromes she made at around 19). She struggled to continue photography for her remaining 65 years, relying mostly on drugstores and minilabs, always disappointed in their work.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>As to Robert Cossar's question, no...we don't all speak for ourselves.</p>

<p>As to "free will," that's a laughable theological concept. A rolling stone DOES gather moss.</p>

<p>As to "like"/"dislike", those are such shallow responses (we are all plagued by them) that they can only be egotistical. Suspending judgment is possible, but not always easy: That idea is some of the moss I started gathering when I first heard Alan Watts fwiw. I hated Goldins photos when I first saw them, just as I hated the photos in "Tulsa", but I did recognize that something about them was compelling. If they were posted on P.N I suspect they'd get very low Ratings.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Did what you did as a kid lead directly to what you do today? How?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I was a pretty conservative and repressed kid. I spent more hours practicing my typing and organizing my desk than I did playing outside. For a time, I got into the security of religion. I always slept with the covers protecting my face. It took smoking my first joint at the end of my freshman year of college to help me realize I could be freer, let go.</p>

<p>I've talked about my own feelings of voyeurism as related to photography. The flip side of that is that making photographs also allows me a little exhibitionism. A couple of actors I've photographed talk about that, too. It's common ground I have with some of my subjects, though from a different side of the lens.</p>

<p>I know my photos can be considered a bit of a diary, especially because of the "familiar" and related subjects. I also think of my photographing as purging. I experience both wanting to honor my past and my roots, many of my natural inclinations to studiousness, logic, isolation, and deliberateness while also breaking free of what I can . . . a move toward relationship and discovery. I didn't do much of the latter as a kid.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Goldin has a different meaning of snapshot than Anders'</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Surely Luis, I'm not Goldin and do not show photos of family and friends in public. You neither, as far as I have seen. In some aspects of her description of how she operates doing snapshots, I can see some resemblance with what I'm doing in some distinct cases, in all modesty.</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p> As the song goes, to sing the blues, you've got to live the blues.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Surely. I think non of us pretend to shoot like Goldin. Some of us pretend to be able to appreciate the artistic and human quality of her shots. I pretend to be one of them. You, maybe too.<br>

Concerning experience with violence in life you seem to imply that you know more then I, on the subject. That might be the case, but who are you to know? You know next to nothing about my life experiences. </p>

 

<p>In the same way but even more of a "snapshot violence" is <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/christine_toomey/article1848411.ece">Boris Mikhailov</a> and there's also <a href="http://www.designboom.com/eng/funclub/billingham.html">Richard Billingham</a>.</p>

<p>A photographer can photograph ones daily environment, or a photographer can escape ones daily environment in photographs. One isn't any more or better than the other and sometimes they morph with each other.</p>

<p>What I did as a kid was seeing the world as a child, with wondrous eyes that were taken for granted, as if reality was like <em>that</em>.</p>

<p>Maybe what we can do today is to peel away...as much of our accumulated filters as possible to see like <em>that</em> again, without losing what made us who we are today.</p>

<p>Or, when was the last time you did ( photographed, saw ) something for the first time <em>?</em></p>

<p>This afternoon, Phylo, shooting the oversaturated world of smaller children.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cNkp4QF3we8">This</a> little devil is pretty cool.</p>

<p><strong>Anders - "</strong>Some of us pretend to be able to appreciate the artistic and human quality of her shots. I pretend to be one of them. You, maybe too."</p>

<p>Why 'pretend'?</p>

<p><strong>Anders - "</strong>Concerning experience with violence in life you seem to imply that you know more then I, on the subject. That might be the case, but who are you to know? You know next to nothing about my life experiences."</p>

<p>Nor do I pretend to know. I was not making a comparison of any kind, Anders. Please relax. All I meant was that the majority of human beings are no strangers to violence.</p>

<p>I think most of us have taken snapshots at both the naive, conceptual and style levels. I have not shown family snaps elsewhere, though I have worked in and shown pictures made in the snapshot style.</p>

<p>Children don't necessarily see things the way we think they do. They're born to fake, that's how they learn to be big people. Some see things darkly, through unabated rage or suffering, or in chaotic, confused ways. They have nightmares. They do trip out to who-knows-where, too, surely we all rember that. I don't think many, outside suburbia, reliably occupy the Disney-bright-colors space. But it's nice to think otherwise.<br>

The photography I cared about as a kid was intentional, something we/I did, not something that happened. My mothers photography was illustrative: farm life, scenes like those she learned about from Minicam. Her father's was full of well posed young people, when he was a young man..along with some inexplicable images of anxious moments. I still have his cameras, and those of my grandmother's uncle, who did portraiture from a wagon. Not that I practice it, but I think zen has more to do with intentionality than spacing out.</p>

 

<p>Luis, fine and sorry for reading something into your text that was not there.<br>

Why "pretend" ? Because we have actually nothing else than the choice of words and opinions to interpret whats reality of each one of us. Maybe another term would be better to express that difference between us here on PN and us in real life.<br>

Luis, what is behind the two terms you used in the text above: snapshot <em>style</em> and snapshot <em>concept ?</em></p>

<p>Thanks for clarifying what you meant by pretense. </p>

<p> The snapshot style, and I used Eggleston as an example, is the complex of visual signifiers that denote what is commonly called a snapshot (and so many PNetters think of as the <em>plague). </em>It is the Ur-language of photography, something that those who understand at least part of it can use to great advantage.</p>

<p>In a different, but similar way to how Walker Evans used the documentary style as a cover for his FSA artwork.</p>

<p>Conceptually, the snapshot is a mnemonic fetish of family members, friends, events, rites of passage, frisky moments, etc. Goldin's style goes well beyond that of the snapshot, but conceptually, most, but not all of the work is.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Snapshot styles and concepts are worth a more detailed discussion comparing it to what is different from it. : studio-work, using tons of equipment, un-decision on when to press the shutter, saving space on memories or saving film, going back over and over again to the same place or person until the scene is ripe; climbing mountains; shooting the exceptional .. you name it. Where are the border lines ?</p>

<p>Luis's "no strangers to violence" comment seems an important snapshot of the real world, nicely relating to the OT.</p>

<p>Let's credit that and talk more about how photography may have appeared or developed in our lives. Goldin did, surely we can too. If photography came to us out of the blue, that was something more than magic...there was some kind of context, even if there seemed to be no "cause".</p>

<p>I'm surprised so few of us even mention early experience with photography. My father sent me a 35mm camera from Korea, 1954: Iloca Rapid B. At the time I was into space ships, not photography...a friend and I turned an abandoned garage into a Buck Rodgers fantasy by stuffing all the knot holes with dozens of accumulated radio tubes. Didn't use the camera for a couple of years, then photographed 5-masted fishing schooners in St. Johns (Newfoundland) harbour, returned to California, photographed Stirling Moss's Birdcage Maserati snarling through the downhill chicane at Laguna Seca. Wish I had the film, should have been Kodachrome. The sports car magazine rejected my shots, claiming they wanted slides (the Maserati was a B&W blur). Went to college, didn't do any photography until junior year when I was handed a Rollei and paid to be the school newspaper's photographer :-)</p>

<p>John Kelly</p>

<p>Photography runs deep in your heritage, not in mine.</p>

<p>I never took a photo before almost age 22.</p>

<p>I read a book a week for each course generally at Columbia College, Columbia University for into my fourth year, and got sick of it.</p>

<p>I had read magazines my entire life.</p>

<p>I lusted to take photos -- to free myself from written words, from writers who wrote text so convoluted often they could not really explain what they were thinking, let alone trying to express.</p>

<p>At least with a camera, I could express something, anything, and it would be mine, not some Ivy League rehash or crap.</p>

<p>I bought a Nikon one day from New York's lowest priced camera merchant in lower Manhattan, two rolls of film, and a 50 mm Nikkor lens, went onto the Staten Island Ferry right afterward (nearby) with a friend, and my form emerged full blown that night on those first two rolls.</p>

<p>I was insecure about it, and stumbled about a lot, but within two to three months was published in the NY Times (p. 3, day after Kennedy was assassinated), Time-Life syndicate (rioters at Columbia, Univ.), NY Daily News (protesters), got shot, when recovered went to the head of AP Photos worldwide in NYC one afternoon and asked to be sent to Viet Nam as a combat photographer.</p>

<p>I am sure he snickered privately, and he talked to me a lot about expensive 'insurance', and advised 'go to a small paper, say, in Pennsylvania, put stuff on the wire, and if we like your stuff, we'll come and get you,' then put his arm around my shoulder with one hand, shook my hand with the other, as he guided me to his door to say goodbye (presumably forever).</p>

<p>That summer I worked a while, a civilian sailor Viet Nam bound got drunk and couldn't work, his shipping company hired me suddenly at 4:30 am one Monday (I had finagled seaman's papers), and so as a civilian I went to Viet Nam with 16,000 tons of bombs and two Nikons. I as undeterred and not about to go to some small paper in Pennsylvania, say.</p>

<p>I separated from my ship in Da Nang, not long after got medically evacuated (gunshot wound, no Pulitzer), flew home, recovered, covered as a freelance campus riots at San Francisco State and later, Berkeley, and AP and UPI both bid to hire me as a staff photographer -- a dream job.</p>

<p>I accepted AP, and on nearly the first week of work before I took any photos, a colleague sent me to meet his old friend from China, Henri Cartier-Bresson and see HCB's photos (which filled the De Young Museum. My colleague figured I'd be inspired. He was wrong.</p>

<p>I went, shook that stranger's hand (I had NO idea who HCB was) came back to AP and quit as photographer, but they surprisingly kept me on as writer.</p>

<p>I never went to a photography class in my life, never printed photos, and never ever even wrote a story when they sat me down after that and said 'kid, here's some numbers, call these people and write a story, which I did with much agony. It was edited and sent on the wire then lots more, fast. I learned to write like the wind.</p>

<p>The second day some of my work went around the world - and in a week some of that was on front pages worldwide.</p>

<p>I went from San Francisco, to Reno where I took photos on the sly as a writer (against union rules), and then guess what?</p>

<p>The guy, legendary head of AP Photos,, Hal Buell, who said 'don't call us, we'll come and get you if we like you', flew to the West Coast (in part) to get me.</p>

<p>I went to work with him in NYC first as a photo editor, later as an editor/manager.</p>

<p>I was being groomed, the general manager of AP told me, to become AP general manager one future day, but they were so damned stingy I just quit, and in one job move quadrupled my salary by moving to a business publication as editor/writer/photographer.</p>

<p>I turned down a job offer as an editor of 'Business Week' I didn't want then to live in NYC. It was very dangerous then.</p>

<p>At night I finished my bachelor's degree interrupted by student rioters at Columbia (I had photographed them and sold the film).</p>

<p>Then law school.</p>

<p>End of story No. 1.</p>

<p>The next significant thing is 30 -35 years later, when I joined Photo.Net</p>

<p>This is story No. 2.</p>

<p>I did almost no photography in the interim -- just a few shots every decade or so.</p>

<p>All because I saw Cartier-Bresson's genius (even if I hadn't a clue on earth who he was).</p>

<p>I 'knew' from seeing his exhibition I was simply, hugely outclassed and there was no place for me to go. I understood reality; he was great though I never heard of him.</p>

<p>I would never be anybody.</p>

<p>He had sucked the air out of the photographic universe as far as where I wanted my work to go.</p>

<p>It took me almost 40 years to remember the handshake and barely meeting the guy for a few seconds.</p>

<p>The actual meeting meant nothing to me; but seeing his life's work in photos changed my entire life. Really!</p>

<p>I never had any camera of any sort before that Nikon (one photo from first roll is in its own folder, in my portfolio here, labeled as such.)</p>

<p>I figure I got it all by osmosis from reading and looking at classic photos in magazines as a youth.</p>

<p>My mentor's Nan Goldin's kid's godfather (if I have it right). They were close photo-based and personal friends (may still be, I don't pry).</p>

<p>He's got a Lucie for his work with the greats in the photo business. He took me to meet Sally Mann at the Gagosian in Beverly Hills. He printed her work, same for the work of Graciela Iturbide the same night, who lectured earlier at her exhibition at the Getty Museum, in a huge exhibition he printed entirely.</p>

<p>I understand that Helmut Newton adored his work on Newton's photos. Same with most greats in the business. (He's now more inactive; I'm a 'project' and friend primarily because of my photography.)</p>

<p>For three years he's been telling me, 'stop shooting, and concentrate on exhibiting in galleries and museums 'at the highest level', and I'm about to try right now with his help (promised) and his black book. (My e-mail today has the promise of help, reiterated.)</p>

<p>Wish me luck, please.</p>

<p>I now have just one thing over HCB.</p>

<p>I'm alive.</p>

<p>Now I gotta try to go make hay.</p>

<p>Sun's shining.</p>

<p>john<br /> John (Crosley)]<br>

With one exception, I don't take photos of loved ones ever; my photos often are too piercing and it can ruin friendships. For the exception, you'll never see the work, though it's quite good, and I would like to show it. My subject vetoes that, and I honor that for just one person in the world.</p>

<p>John Crosley, thanks for that! </p>

<p>I do have a very long photo heritage, goes back into the 19th century in California...but mine's not nearly as intense as yours. </p>

<p>We all have very long photo heritages if we think about it: There's more to it than clicking...lust for it from (or for!) pictures in magazines certainly qualifies!</p>