Nan Goldin 從我接觸攝影開始，就一直是我最最喜歡的攝影家，在她的作品裡看不到任何技巧上的修飾，純粹展現的就是透過攝影者身處的場景〝本身〞，透過她的影像我所看見的不是她想傳達的訊息，而是〝她〞的人、她的生命，這是所有事物最動人的本質，不經任何的轉譯與再詮釋，也是我最希望、正在如此地讓自己去活的方式。
以下英文原文摘錄自 ...
http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/thanksgiving/《Nan Goldin：Thanksgiving》
26 Nov — 15 Jan 2000
Duke Street
American artist Nan Goldin made an installation of photographs that depict events spanning the period of her life from 1973 to 1999 — a kind of micro-retrospective, the show covered the gallery walls from floor to ceiling. It created an intense, shrine-like environment that completely immersed the viewer in Goldin’s world, functioning as a homage both to the friendships that had survived through those twenty-six years, and to those friends she had lost.
Goldin says that photography taught her how to function as a human being; how to have relationships with people. She has continually recorded her community of friends and lovers and, in turn, her own intimate, personal history: ‘My work originally came from the snapshot aesthetic. I think it’s one of the purest uses of photography. Snapshots are taken out of love and to remember shared times.’ Empathy is perhaps Goldin’s greatest asset, and she uses it to capture the ambience and texture of a volatile world of cheap hotel rooms, low-rent apartments and dirty bedsits, bars and clubs — all shot from an insider’s point of view.
Goldin also uses her camera as a means of self-preservation, often making harrowing self-portraits—in one, her face in horribly swollen and bruised—in order to remind herself of the damage caused by being in an abusive relationship. She has also taken photographs as a means of recording, over time, how her community dealt with the effect of AIDS, and struggled with drug addiction.
There is a documentary immediacy to Goldin’s work, while, at the same time, the pictures possess an intensity that results from a combination of formal clarity and marked corporeality. In her more recent images of light-infused landscapes, the artist defines a new kind of beauty, as well as communicating an overwhelming sense of loss. Goldin has said that until she detoxed, she had no real relationship to daylight and the natural world, as she lived totally in the night and so could not connect. Since detoxing, her work has revealed an intense emotional response to the forms and colours of the natural landscape—something largely untouched in her earlier work.
以下英文原文摘錄自 ...
http://fototapeta.art.pl/2003/ngie.php
Photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.
You also help other people to survive. Memory about them does not disappear, because they are on your pictures.
It is about keeping a record of the lives I lost, so they cannot be completely obliterated from memory. My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them. The people are gone, like Cookie, who is very important to me, but there is still a series of pictures showing how complex she was. Because these pictures are not about statistics, about showing people die, but it is all about individual lives.
《The Ballad of Sexual Dependency》
I made this slideshow about my life, about my past life. Later, I realized how political it was. It is structured this way so it talks about different couples, happy couples. For me, the major meaning of the slideshow is how you can become sexually addicted to somebody and that has absolutely nothing in common with love.
It is about violence, about being in a category of men and women. It is constructed so that you see all different roles of women, then of children, the way children are brought up, and these roles, and then men, then it shows a lot of violence. That kind of violence the men play with. It goes to clubs, bars, it goes to prostitution as one of the options for women - prostitution or marriage. Then it goes back to the social scene, to married and re-married couples, couples having sex, it ends with twin graves.
Anything that I see and I love is an influence, but I never try to replicate somebody else.
Actually, I take blurred pictures, because I take pictures no matter what the light is. If I want to take a picture, I do not care if there is light or no light. If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what.
〝I always thought that if I managed to photograph somebody often enough, I could never lose them. My photographs are, however, the proof of how much I have lost.〞
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