The Devil's Playground: 0000

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After attending the Boston School of Fine Arts, Goldin moved to New York in 1978, drawn by the myth of the artist’s life in the big city. She is most famous for her Ballad of Sexual Dependency photographs, a constantly changing slide show of approximately 750 photographs set to music. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. This monograph brings to light both the sources of Goldin’s inspiration and her life as a prominent contemporary artist: she is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading photographers.

The titles of the works tell us the names of these friends, making them familiar: Suzanne Crying, New York, 1985; Cookie and Vittorio’s Wedding, New York, 1986; Joey at the Love Ball, New York, 1991, etc. It comes in a specially made box together with an original Cibachrome print, also signed and numbered by Nan Goldin. Since the early 1970s, Goldin has taken numerous photographs of her friends and 'family', which form a unique corpus of work. And so while still a teenager, she began to shoot ‘snapshots’, thousands of images, like most young people did during the 1970s and 1980s – before computers.The mysteryof loss, the depth of feelings it arouses, as well as the spiritual longing it triggers, are also expressed through powerful images of relics, ex-voto and religious images ( Skulls and Tears, Chapel of Salpétrière, Paris, 1999; Masectomy ex-voto, Madonna dell’Arco, Somma Vesuviana, 1996).

In recent years, Goldin also has photographed magical landscapes like the intensely blue sea in a grotto in Capri, the Stromboli volcano steaming at dawn, ex-votos in Somma Vesuviana, or the smoking tar pits of Solfatara near Pozzuoli. I can say that I now see how people feel while looking my pictures as for some they could indicate the same exact feeling that I felt right at the moment of reading through the pictures. Encountering the installation is a continuous emotion: the musical background is a collage of the eclectic music the artist loves; the projected images run along the wall in incessant fashion, from the photo of a birthday party in 1981, with Goldin seated in ‘her’ boyfriend’s arms, to other embracing couples, to friends who cry while they confide in Nan, to women in bathtubs, to people drinking: “It’s ultimately about how difficult it is to couple, says the artist, and how intense the need is. At the same time, her art visualizes what characterizes personal memory and distinguishes it from the collective – the way we have of ‘filing away’ life in idiosyncratic fashion, like a fluid and changing universe of traces and details, and without objective relationships of scale among the various memories. This book features a significant body of latest work by Goldin, including photographs from new series such as Still on Earth (1997-2001), 57 Days (2000) and Elements (1995-2003), many of which are previously unpublished.While looking at the pictures, I wanted to almost identify myself with the voyuer, wanting to see what I see in private. In the intensely haunting images of this “ Devil’s Playground“, the sky and the sea are not totally separate, and the air becomes thick. The Devil’s Playground was the first major book to be published on Goldin’s work since 1996 and it is by far her most important to date. Every shot is the maximum moment of an encounter, that instant that inevitably precedes separation, the lens that closes, darkness. Since the 1980s Goldin's photographs have been exhibited internationally, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museu Reina Sofia in Madrid.