A fabulous vintage poster for Nan Godin’s The Other Side exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.   The Other Side was a drag queen bar in Boston in the 1970’s, and was later the title of one of Nan Goldin’s books.

The poster features a Nan Goldin artwork ‘Ivy in the Boston Garden, Veiled, 1973’ a drag queen smoking a cigarette in a holder, wearing a classy outfit, veiled… looking a million dollars.

‘I was 18, and felt like I was a queen, completely devoted to my friends, they became my whole world. Part of my worship of them involved, photographing them. I wanted to show them how beautiful they were. I never saw them as men dressing as women, but as something different a third gender’

Living in more enlightened times Nan’s words feel almost prophetic.

‘I called them queens because I worshipped them. Basically, I found them some of the most incredible people in the world. Everybody stigmatised them, and I found them so beautiful and so moving and powerful in their lives. They were my supermodels.’

The Other Side became the name of one of Nan Goldin’s books, a collection of photos of her drag queen housemates, she also published a second edition entitled Another Side.  They are typical Nan Goldin photos, it’s the intimacy that sets them apart.  Whereas there were other great photographers who were social documentarians Nan was different.  Godin was a diarist, she lived her work.

The result is some of the most intimate moments seen in photography, a chronical of some of the major social upheavals of our time.  Gender, the HIV epidemic, domestic violence, opioid abuse… she was a frontline journalist in the culture wars. 

Nan Goldin was recently voted the most influential person in art.  But it was a rocky road that Nan travelled to get to where she is.

‘we had a lot of pressure and in intellectual Jewish lot of pressure to succeed on it started really young. I think my parents had no idea what a child was and wanted us to be perfect from the minute we were born in 1965’

Barbara, Goldin's older sister, took her own life while Nan was just 11 years old.  Her sister’s sexuality and repression had sent her on a spiral and she lay down on the train tracks next to the family home in Washington DC.  Not wanting the same fate Nan ran away at the age of 14.  She bounced around a number of foster homes and schools before she found her place at the Satya school in Lincoln, Massachusetts there she was introduced to photography and the reclusive Goldin finally found her voice.

'I was very very shy in the camera became my first way of talking, I used photography to get through my fears'

Nan Goldin’s photos were not accepted by the art establishment, they came at a time of a much different aesthetic.   These were the time of highly stylized photos, with exemplary lighting and meticulously placed models.  Nan’s photos were the opposite, raw moments cemented in time, it’s been said that Goldin’s work is more about honesty than aesthetic.

‘My work is to make records but nobody can re-edit or deny’

We have more works by the fabulous Nan Goldin