Nan Goldin
2010
Archival pigment print
101.6 × 69.5 cm
Winsing Arts Collection

Nan Goldin
2010
Archival pigment print
101.6 × 69.5 cm
Winsing Arts Collection
This work is part of Nan Goldin's ongoing Scopophilia series since 2010. The word "Scopophilia" literally means the desire to watch others, or the sexual pleasure drawn chiefly from looking at images of the body; in psychological and psychiatric terms, it refers to voyeurism, a desire rooted in observation.
The theme of the series revolves around love and desire, and Goldin has paired autobiographical images with photographs of paintings and sculptures from the Louvre's collection, including slideshows and photographic forms. With permission being granted back then, Goldin would enter the Louvre every Tuesday and walk through the museum's collection of sculptures and paintings and take pictures of them. From thousands of photographs of paintings and sculptures in the Louvre's collection, Goldin created a 25-minute operatic slideshow in which historical images of mythological figures such as Narcissus, Tiresias, Cupid and Psyche are combined with her photographs from the 1970s to convey a dialogue between the past and the present, and a connection to millennia of depictions of desire, sex, and violence.
