When watching Nan Goldin’s canonical slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, I have always been struck hard by her photos from Berlin, where she traveled to on several extended trips throughout the 80s, 90s, and 00s (including a year-long trip in 1991 financed by the DAAD). The subliminal quality of the city in those decades seemed particularly amenable to her very personal vision of photography and its uses. Employing the same strategies she used in New York City and elsewhere in the 70s, including portraiture (self and other), snapshot, and nudes, Goldin produced a highly subjective document of a troubled city. The metaphors already at play in her work – ersatz interiors standing in for emotional failure, bathing for emotional cleansing – were all the more useful in a city fighting to affirm its own identity in the midst of social and political flux. Goldin’s reflection in a mirror (one of her most familiar visual tropes, and an assertion of her self-hood through years of physical and emotional abuse) doubles its meaning in Berlin, reflecting not just her own psychological turmoils, but those of close friends, lovers, and strangers in the night, whose directness of gaze stands in stark contrast to the peeling wallpaper and kitschy paintings that surround them.
Later this month Berlinische Galerie will mount an exhibit of this body of work, including both the classic images included in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and many unpublished photos from Goldin’s archive. It promises to open up an only glimpsed facet of Goldin’s work.
Nan Goldin – Berlin Work: Photographs 1984-2009
November 20 2010 – March 28 2011
Berlinische Galerie
Alte Jakobstraße 124-128
Photograph: Self Portrait in my Blue Bathroom, Berlin, by Nan Goldin
