Surface Tension

According to many, fashion is superficial—it is about surface, exaggeration, frivolity. It is, both as a sensibility and a process (the act of getting dressed), about adopting and embracing a disguise, a cover-up. Fashion, at its best and its worst, relies on an acceptance of the fake—the external. Fashion photography is, then, a festival of trickery, a heady, multilayered performance.

Ironic, then, that Nan Goldin, a photographer whose work is so frequently described as “truthful,” who makes pictures about the internal—pictures that, like jolts to the heart, move us, through the sheer relief of recognition and emotional relatability—is a fan of the fashion image. Goldin discovered fashion photography in the early 1970s through the work of Guy Bourdin. She was particularly enamored with his shoe advertisements for Charles Jourdan and his 1976 lingerie catalog for Bloomingdale’s, Sighs and Whispers (incidentally, the only “book” of Bourdin’s work published during his lifetime).

Goldin also loved Cecil Beaton and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who was a pioneer in getting models out of the studio and to locations. Writing in (2010), Guido Costa says that Goldin’s early works “aspire to a sort of fashion-magazine glamour, and look more towards than to the classical traditions of photography.” And yet, he says, “There is too