Photographer Nan Goldin’s work is inextricably bound up in her own life. Her most famous book The Ballad of Sexual Dependancy documented her surrogate family of misfits and the Manhattan scene they belonged to, before the immolation of the Eighties. Over the years she has remained faithful to her idea of taking photographs in order, “to retain memory and make a record against revisionism”, by using natural light to capture an image that, if not quite figurative, is pure in the essence of the moment.
The newly opened Sprovieri Gallery are kicking off with Goldin’s seventh slide-show exhibition. Fire Leap features images of her friends and family’s children from 1972 to present, as well as a series of landscape photographs taken during her travels since the late Seventies. While the former feeds from Goldin’s fascination with childish innocence and freedom, the latter are more than simply expansive visions of beauty. They are a meditation on her own emotional experience.
As Goldin says, the images: “have been my secret metaphors for loneliness… I was trying to break the glass between the outside world and me. I had lived in a dark space for 15 years so the landscape was unfamiliar to me, a fascination with an unknown world outside.”
While dancing children and moonlit trees might seem a world away from the gay bars and whorehouses with which Goldin made her name, they are, with their raw intimacy and muted entropy, unmistakably her visions.
Nan Goldin, Fire Leap, 24 June – 8 August at the Sprovieri Gallery, W1B 4BQ.
sprovieri.com
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