To experience one of Nan Goldin’s slideshows is to acquire a glimpse into another world. These images, slowly oscillating to a variety of evocative tunes, are their own kind of cinema. Take The Other Side: it is a work that offers a mere 16 minute glimpse into the beauty of queer and trans performers, but feels like a lifetime of footage. The mood changes along with the images, while each song – be it Charles Aznavour’s ‘What Makes a Man a Man’ or Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever’ – helps craft a story that is in conversation with the other montages.
“I’ve always said that if anyone would have taken as many pictures as me they could be considered a good photographer,” Nan Goldin noted in a 2020 interview for Aperture Magazine. “But that’s not the point. The point is what I’ve done with the pictures. The point is about making cinematic work out of still images, and the editing is where I feel my intelligence lies.”
The evolution of her work over is entirely composed of scenes from 30 of her favourite films. ‘Sirens’, in particular, is fascinating – it is built around Carmelo Bene’s 1972 film and the footage of Black supermodel Donyale Luna filched from films by Andy Warhol and Federico Fellini, and which explicitly draws a parallel to her own lived experiences with love and drugs.
