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2009 EDITION

July 7th - September 13th

Ca me touche
Nan Goldin's guests

For years I hated photography. I believed anyone could do it. All you had to do was point the camera, maybe focus it, and there it was, a picture. Especially with the advent of digital cameras and phones there was an onslaught of pictures everywhere. I have always felt that I was being lazy, using photos as my major art form while what I really wanted to do was to make films, an art form that incorporated photography, narrative, literature and music.

Film is the great influence on my life, my greatest field of knowledge, what I most respect and learn the most from. That is the reason I make slide shows, which are similar to films made out of stills. I want the experience of art to transport me, move me, make me feel what it describes. This is the major thread in the choices I made for this show. My taste in my own collection is free and widespread, not bound by rules, something that I think finds expression here in the photographers I chose for this exhibit.

One of the reasons I support and like all the photographers in the show I’ve curated is that they seek to express their own truths. Technology has perverted what I believe in as art. As Peter Hujar used to say, ‘Blow it up and they’ll call it art’. Peter, whom I loved and respected, utterly believed in photography—and his faith inspired my own. The photographers in this exhibition have this same faith, which is why I feel honoured to have gone over their work, editing it for this show. I chose people whose work caused me to have a strong emotional response.

This is for me the most important issue in the nature of how I respond to things, to art. It must move me, affect me in some profound way. It is the strongest single common thread in my selection of the artists in this show. The artists in the exhibition are rigorous in seeking reality. Modern technology has so often perverted what I believe in as art. So much of what is called art is faked that very few people believe that a photograph can be real any more. The search for reality, rather than the creation of a virtual reality, is essential to me. Reality is mysterious enough. It is the exploration of mystery that makes this work intense. These photographers are willing to explore the unknown, to take risks and put themselves on the line.

The presentation of this work has been collaborative between me and the artists. Some of these photographers are widely published; others are in the process of becoming known. I have enjoyed editing their work so much that I even looked through their contact sheets. We came to feel that each artist made a strong statement even if we were able to show only a part of their work. It took a lot of trust on their part to allow me to edit with them. For me the most important issue of the show is the articulation of their vision. There are so many different modes in this show, but they all touch me in some profoundway.


Nan Goldin, March 2009.

Nan Goldin

Born in 1953 in Washington, United States.

Lives and works in New York and Paris.


Nan Goldin began photographing at the age of 15. Her first exhibition of black and white photographs took place in the early 1970s. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1977. She moved to New York in 1978 where she continued to document her ‘extended family’. These photographs became the subject of her slide shows and first book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, published in 1986. It was groundbreaking work, as she was the first woman to use photography to present the intimate details of her personal life as a public work of art, and inspired a new generation of artists. In 1985 her work was included in the Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and her importance in the photographic world became significant. In 1987, she began working with Pace/MacGill gallery, New York. In 1989, she curated her first exhibition about AIDS. In 1991 she moved to Berlin, Germany, on a DAAD grant, where she gained international renown in the art world and the world of cinema.

She began working with Scalo in 1992 and put out her second book The Other Side, her work about drag queens from 1972 to 1992. She has participated in many artistic collaborations, including the book A Double Life with her old friend David Armstrong, and the book Tokyo Love with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, both published in 1994. In 1996, a major retrospective exhibition of her work, I’ll be Your Mirror, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and toured to museums in Europe. At that time, she began working with the Matthew Marks gallery in New York and Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris. She continued to show widely in the US and Europe, and published a number of books.

In 2001 she moved to Paris. Today she works and lives both in Paris and New York. The same year, a second retrospective, Le Feu Follet, was held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and it travelled under the title Devil’s Playground to the Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, the Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, and Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. In relation to the show, she produced an enormous book, Devil’s Playground, published by Phaidon.

Her multimedia installation Sisters, Saints and Sibyls at the Festival d’automne in 2004 drew the largest attendance ever at the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière. This piece, a combination of film and still images projected on three screens, is a story of three women trapped in a male hierarchy. It pays homage to her sister Barbara, whose rebellion and suicide have so deeply marked her own life and work. She has continued to create new slide shows, exhibited wideley.

The awards and fellowships Goldin has received include the award of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Paris, in 2006 and the Medal of the City of Paris in 2004. In 2007, she received the Hasselblad Award, for which Steidl published the book The Beautiful Smile the same year. Others include the Brandeis Award in Photography, 1994, DAAD Artists-in-Residence Programme, Berlin, 1991, The Camera Austria Award, 1989, Kodak Photobook, Arles, 1987, and Englehard Award, Boston, 1986.