'There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.'
Nan Goldin rose to fame with her autobiographical visual diary The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which chronicled her life and friendships against the backdrop of an era informed by the AIDS epidemic of the 1970s and 80s. Named after a song from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s play The Threepenny Opera (1928), this deeply personal project comprises approximately 700 intimate portraits in slideshow format accompanied by music from the 1970s and 80s by the likes of the Velvet Underground and Dionne Warwick. Described by Goldin as ‘the diary I let people read,’ the images from The Ballad portray Goldin herself, her friends, fellow artists, performers, and drag queens – those whom she calls her ’family’ – in vivid color as they party, have sex, take drugs, and do everything in between.
Goldin’s work has been described by Lisa Liebman in Art Forum as ‘low-rent glamour, like a true fleur du mal or a ’70s Fassbinder film, feeds more on defeat than on success, on squalor as well as on beauty, on death as on life, and on the myopia of self-absorption along with grand visions, however blinding, of love’ (October 2002 issue). With its youthful protagonists, implied intimacy, and saturated coloration, An Afternoon in L’Hotel is an exemplary work from Nan Goldin’s oeuvre. Shot mostly in a hotel bedroom with flash, she explores the complex, intimate relationships between her close friends in a new way by splicing several scenes together rather than showing just one image. Goldin does not believe in the Decisive Moment, or that one person’s essence can be captured in one shot.
‘Now I use grids when I show pieces on the wall, which I’ve wanted to do since the ’80s, but I couldn’t afford it then. They are like storyboards. I show a lot of grids and triptychs and diptychs. In the late 1990s and the 2000s, I was influenced by color-field painting. It doesn’t relate to my work, but I like art that’s very far away from me. And I started making grids that were just colors. Black, red, a kind of homage to the color field painters.’
Goldin’s grids are reminiscent of her Ballad and other slideshows in that they provide a narrative that she can control. The themes are the same, her friends, sex, drugs, relationships between women, and this composite format allows her to expand on the narrative treatment. In the 2000s, around the t.mes that she shot the images that comprise An Afternoon in L’Hotel, Goldin had been living in Paris and Berlin and would not return to the United States for about a decade. She never felt like she really got to know those European cities, however, because she constantly felt as though she was hiding due to her crippling shyness. Hotel rooms and their inherently transient implications are a recurring theme in Goldin’s work - she often photographs beds devoid of people, with half-eaten breakfast trays, unmade beds, and bare mattresses.
Goldin was inspired by Garry Winogrand, but especially by Larry Clark (see Lot 46) who allowed viewers into his world through Tulsa and Teenage Lust, into bedrooms, into the world of hard drugs, all in the style of a family album. ‘Goldin’s work, like that now-vanished East village milieu it emerged from, seems to want to have things both ways. It is ostensibly bohemian but filled with bourgeois longings for power and position. It is graphic without being truly revealing; the viewer is allowed to peer in but never really see’ (Art in America, June 2001, p. 127).
Goldin’s career and her efforts to hold the Sackler family accountable for their role in the opioid crisis are the subject of Laura Poitras’ moving 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which was nominated for an Oscar in the Documentary Feature Film category.