Born in 1953 to a Jewish family in Washington, D.C., USA, Goldin left home at the age of 14 after being traumatized by her sister's suicide. She was introduced to photography in 1968 when she was given her first Polaroid camera while attending the Satya Community School in Boston, and David Armstrong was her first subject at the time. From the early 1970s, Goldin took a series of black-and-white photographs of Boston's transgender communities, which led to her first solo exhibition in 1973. After graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston, she moved to New York City where she continued documenting her friends, as well as the city's diverse landscape and culture.
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency series is a very important creation in Goldin's career. Her work went against the grain of the academic photography of the time, documenting the realities of the East Village of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, ranging from drag queens, same-sex and heterosexual couples in love or troubled relationships, drug addiction and sexuality, as well as the private lives of individuals. “Nan One Month After Being Battered” is one of the most famous photographs, in which Goldin's face is beaten to the point of severe bruising, with one eye barely open. This photograph marked the culmination of her photography as a way of documenting the highs and lows of a relationship, and a graphic and living example, as Goldin once put it: "I want to show exactly what my world looks like, without glamorisation, without glorification. This is not a bleak world but one in which there is an awareness of pain, a quality of introspection.”
On display at the Winsing Art Place is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a series of photographs, including “Cookie laughing, NYC”, which documents Goldin's intimate friendship with her close friend Cookie Mueller. Goldin once described her this way: "I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough. I put together this series of pictures from the hundreds I took of Cookie during the 13 years I knew her in order to keep her with me. In fact it shows me how much I’ve lost." From the time they met in 1976 until Mueller's passing from AIDS in 1989, Goldin documented her time with Mueller, showing the depth of their relationship. “Cupid with his wings on fire, Le Louvre” is Goldin's Scopophilia series from 2010, in which she took snapshots of sculptures and paintings displayed at the Louvre, or placed them alongside her own photographs, depicting the links between desire, the body and sexuality from the past to the present. The exhibition also includes “Sirens”, a video work from Goldin's first entry at the Venice Biennale in 2022, which conveys the senses and states of mind and body through a metaphor of the Greek mythological figures the Sirens and a tribute to the black model Donyale Luna. Photography is Goldin's medium for proving to the world what she has been through. Her work is about unstable and fascinating times, her family, her past, and reveals her desire to preserve the meaning of people's lives, giving beauty and strength to what she sees in them.
%20(5).webp)
%20(3).webp)
%20(4).webp)
%20(6).webp)
%20(7).webp)
