A Bit More Detail

By now, you've probably gotten a fairly good idea about the sorts of art that I prefer, both things that I generate (writing and photography) and things like I like (physical arts and movies and literature). I like things to be orderly, well-structured, coherent; I like things that illustrate issues superbly, preferably without too much of the sort of passion that could disturb these illustrations. Spontaneity? I've gotten better at enjoying it, and even at initiating it, but things that are too spontaneous aren't things I prefer.

But. When it comes to photography, my favourite photographers are not ones who--like me--take fairly static photos of their environments, with interesting angles and perspectives and colours. My favourite photographers are the ones whose works are filled with barely sublimated passion and energy, photos filled with energy and drive and even a bit of danger. What sorts of images and which photographers? Take, say, Helmut Newton and his "Sie Kommen (Naked and Dressed)."

( Not worksafe, sadly )

Do my photographic preferences suggest that I'm sublimating something? "Perhaps" is all that I can say now.

And you? What do your preferences in art say about you? Does it say things you've not quite acknowledged to yourself?

Discuss.

I first saw the photographic works of Nan Goldin on the 28th of August, 2003. I had bought, at the Dorchester Street tourist information centre, a passbook allowing unrestricted access to two dozen different museums and other cultural attractions over two days, and I had decided that the Musée de l’art contemporain de Montréal would be one of the museums that I would see in the course of my two days. Entering the museum, I saw the announcement of a Nan Goldin career retrospective that had already run most of the summer and would continue for only a week or two longer. I congratulated myself on my good luck, showed my passbook, and entered.

That exhibition of Nan Goldin photographs was the first time I'd encountered her art, the first time I'd encountered photography as an art form, really, the only thing that I remember from that trip. The pictures were so direct and frank, so honest, so emotional, that I couldn't help it. Their power was remarkable, as was the history of her career.

(I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I don't have any of her pictures up for this post, but I've exceeded my monthly Flickr quota and I dislike stealing others' bandwidth. This Google Images search will show you all of the Nan Goldin photos that you might want.)

Goldin started her career in the 1960s taking photographs of her friends. Heavily influenced by the shimmer of disappearing elegance in Hollywood movies and European fashion photography, these early black and white snapshots record the transformation from adolescence to adulthood.

Goldin celebrates the life-stories of individuals by returning to them as subjects over several decades. One series charts the life of her friend, underground actress Cookie Mueller, famous for her collaborations with film director John Waters. The series starts with a portrait of Cookie and her son and ends with an image of Cookie in her coffin, her son grieving. In these photographic records no aspect of the human condition is ignored - from couples making love to friends dying of Aids. She captures her subjects' shifting realities and creates testaments to their lives.

Celebrating the exuberance of self-created worlds, the first drag-queen series reveals a period in her life when she flat-shared with two transvestites. Turning her camera on their public on-stage personas as well as more intimate, domestic moments, these images shot in intensely saturated colour, revel in heavy make-up, glittery costumes and glamorous poses. Later works document Gay Pride in New York, as well as visits to Bangkok and Tokyo.

Goldin made her name in the arts world with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, first shown at the legendary Mudd Club in New York in 1979. Now a cult classic, this 700-image slide-show captures women and men in day-to-day activities - lying in unmade beds, talking on the telephone, staring into mirrors, drinking in clubs, coming home in taxis. Accompanied by music ranging from Brecht to Dean Martin, The Ballad also uncovers a darker reality with disturbing images of battered women, prostitutes and junkies.

The Balllad of Sexual Dependency was the next major work of hers that I encountered, and its cataloguing of the moments in the lives of her friends and lovers and herself again got me.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read. My written diaries are private; they form a closed document of my world and allow me the distance to analyze it. My visual diary is public; it expands from its subjective basis with the input of other people. These pictures may be an invitation to my world, but they were taken so that I could see the people in them. I sometimes don’t know how I feel about someone until I take his or her picture. [. . .]

If it were possible, I’d want no mechanism between me and the moment of photographing. The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex. The instant of photographing, instead of creating distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection for me (6)

It's only after I began to get to know photographers her in Toronto, and I began myself to take photos in a systematic way that I got what she meant in the introduction to that book. I carry my camera everywhere with me, on the lookout for something that catches my interest: a landscape, a flower or tree, an animal like a pet, even people frozen for a moment in a pose. I never know where I'll find an image that I'll treasure: a fiery sunset, a kitten picture, any one of a number of streetscapes, a gate opening out onto a frozen field. Each of these pictures captures something that will change and disappear over time (night and morning come, the kitten grows, buildings change and occupants move in and out, winter ice melts). With Goldin's pictures--lovers in coitus, a baby caught in a pose worthy of Rembrandt, someone dressing, a couple relaxing in the sun, a man cruising another through a window, a heart-shaped bruise on her leg after her lover beat her--all of those moments are captured with a heart-breaking clarity. What emotion she captures!

When I was eighteen I started to photograph. [. . .] For years, I thought I was obsessed with the record-keeping of my day-to-day life. But recently, I’ve realized my motivation has deeper roots: I don’t really remember my sister. In the process of leaving my family, in creating myself, I lost the real memory of my sister. I remember my version of her, of the things she said, of the things she meant to me. But I don’t remember the tangible sense of who she was, her presence, what her eyes looked like, what her voice sounded like.

I don’t ever want to be susceptible to anyone else’s version of my history.

I don’t ever want to lose the real memory of anyone again (9).

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? My snows aren't so much the people I've lost--although I do have a WAV recording of my grandmother laughing from back in 1999--as it is my experiences on Prince Edward Island as an adolescent and a young adult. I felt so scared all the time, so depressed and so isolated, that the parts of my life that didn't involve academics I've mostly forgotten. I hate to admit it, but I have no memory at all of some of the people who knew me in high school or university; they're all just a blur. I like organizing items and keeping them in order, copying all of my files from one system to another to another, looking for readers, at least, that will permit me to read the oldest stuff. The knowledge that there's all manner of people and cues and events I've missed saddens and scares me. That might explain why the transient photos I've taken of living things involve flowers and trees, very rarely people; it's too awkward for me thanks to the memories.

Goldin feels something like that, if to a much greater and much more accurate degree. The last photograph in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, on page 143, is an image, painted on a door, of two skeletons kissing, the last remnants of a pair of flash-vapourized lovers, preserved forever by an apocalyptic moment. I’d seen this image before, reproduced in Alan Moore’s The Watchmen, taken from a New York City on the verge of an unknowable catastrophe. Her catastrophe was AIDS, something that devastated her circle of gays and artists. Cookie Mueller, an actor and a columnist as mentioned above, was a friend. Her essay collection, Ask Dr. Mueller, is in print and available through the Toronto public library system. It's a nice essay collection.

On page 29 of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, there is a picture of her, seated and looking inwards, at Tin Pan Alley in New York City in 1983, blonde-haired and sharp-featured and attractive. On page 102, there is another picture of her, as she reclines on a multicoloured hammock in a darkened room in Provincetown MA in 1977, her son Max sitting next to her. The most emotionally resonant image featuring Cookie Mueller, though, features her at her wedding to Vittorio Scarpati, in New York City, in 1986, on page 99. Cookie’s wedding photograph is to the right of another wedding image, a photograph of Goldin’s parents’ wedding photo, on page 98. This second image is formally posed, her father standing behind her mother; their faces are only barely visible. The wedding photo is framed on a cabinet in a corner of a yellow-wallpapered room (shades of Charlotte Gilman?). To the left, a suburban backyard can be seen, with a collapsible Coleman tent-trailer. The second couple is photographed in colour, close up to the exclusion of background, unposed. He, dressed in black, is looking down and smiling. She, dressed in white, is crying happily, handkerchief pressed to right cheek. Goldin’s parents are static and old; Cookie and Mueller are vibrant and new.

Cookie died in 1989 of AIDS, just months after Scarpati. Those were only two losses among many. In her massive 2003 tome Devil's Playground, she has a series of pictures featuring her HIV-positive friends who were still alive, but the days before ARV sharply reduced those numbers. Her series following Gilles and Gotscho as the later died also comes to mind. That and other forms of loss are present in Devil's Playground at the same time that other images captu8re moments of joy and happiness, lovers embracing and parents watching their child and gazing pensively out a train window. All these moments have been preserved.

Goldin's photography is dominated by its remarkable ability to preserve transience (things arrive, things fade) and by a remarkable eye for detail (a moment preserved). The loss that comes from her photography is something that anyone can empathize with, just as the happiness that you can witness is at least something that you want to experience. Her eye for all this detail, individual strains combined into one, is the thing that marks her as my favourite art photographer. She should be yours, too.

I wonder. Is it a coincidence that my blog's name is "A Bit More Detail"?

(For whoever's interested, this post was four years in the making. So there.)