Nan Goldin’s Self-Portrait In Kimono With Brian: a study in domesticity
This article is more than 7 years oldLong before the age of the selfie, Goldin trained a camera on herself to illustrate the tension between private life and public portrayalGetting real
The photographer Nan Goldin and her boyfriend, Brian, are turned away from one another, their faces glumly set. Brian is as naked as the moment, bathed in an amber-rose light. Is this post-coital or post-argument?
Bohemian rhapsody
It’s a typically revealing image from Goldin’s vastly influential 1980s series, The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency. Long before our selfie era, she trained her camera on herself and her friends – a tribe of artists, drag queens and partygoers, living a bittersweet bohemian dream in New York’s Lower East Side.
Life inside
The stories play out largely indoors – in bedrooms, cabs, restrooms, bars. And there’s a tension between this private interior world and staged public display, the poses and attitudes adopted from pop culture and beyond. This is clear from the photo on the wall, in which Brian poses as a rebel without a cause, in bed again, with a cigarette.
Moving pictures
A slideshow set to a pop, opera and blues soundtrack, Ballad transforms gritty, outre life of sex, drugs, violence into an unsparing elegy.
Part of Terrains Of The Body, Whitechapel Gallery, E1, to Sunday 16 April
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