Nan Goldin, an American photographer, known for her stylish works. Goldin ran away from home when she was only 14. She lived with a group of young people who struggled with their lives and self-imposed exile in the United States. To record her own life, Goldin started to shoot real and messy lives of her close friends. As she said, “I photograph directly from my life. Those pictures come out of relationships, not observation” (MOMA). Therefore, those photographs were collected together and presented in slide form called “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.”

I visited her exhibition on Tuesday at MOMA. The first thought came to my mind was shock. All of her work featured LGBT-related themes, violence, illness, depression, and drugs.  As growing in a traditional family, I was resistant to those themes of nude and dark humanity. However, I started to observe something different among photographs while I was watching the slides of Godin’s work. This 45-minute slide show is set to a soundtrack. Different periods of figures were shown with different music. They lived in crazy and self-imposed exile society and tried to prove themselves to the public. In Goldin’s camera, those young people struggled with their own lives no matter what role of characters they played in that society. In this slide, Goldin used her camera to portray her friends’ experiences about childhood memory, fell in love with others, sexual abuse, relationship, marriage, fight, pregnant, children and until they died. Goldin astonished me not only she showed her and her friends’ real lives, but also she’s good at using light and create a better view of some dark and bad environment.

One photograph impressed me a lot is Goldin’s portrait. This portrait is named as “Nan one month after being battered.” Normally, photographers don’t put themselves into their cameras. In this photo, we can easily see that Goldin had a very bad experience at that time. Her bruise still did not go away after she got her boyfriend’s abuse one month later. As Goldin said, the reason she kept this photo was that she wanted to remind herself to not suffer again. From here, we can see Goldin’s photographs are showing her own privacy to the public by using this way of recording life. After finishing watching this slide show, I felt like I just peeped someone’s private diary. No matter how messy or dark the environment was, Goldin could always create some conditions to make the figures look better in her camera. Such as yellowish orange light, all the shadows on the figures, and strong sense of line and so on. Goldin is really good at taking a candid photograph because we can feel the figure’s emotions when we look at those photos.  To be a real life photographer, Goldin did it perfectly.