As soon as I can figure a way to bypass this infernal FTP-thwarting corporate moloch, I will post a Nan Goldin photograph for your consumption. You can read this to prepare.

Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror
Hripsimé Visser

At the beginning of the 1950s, an "angry young man," Ed van der Elsken went to Paris, to get away from the narrow-mindedness of The Netherlands in the midst of its postwar reconstruction. In the City of Light, or more precisely on the Left Bank, he fell in with a group of young people who spent their days chiefly in cheap hotel rooms and cafes, drinking, smoking, dancing and having sex. In them Ed van der Elsken recognized his own aversion to petty bourgeois values, balanced between romanticism and nihilism. He felt he was a photographer, admired the emotionality of Emmy Andriesse, the rawness of Weegee, but could not find a niche in official photographic circles, nor in the photo press agency Magnum, nor as a fashion photographer. The men and women of his new circle of friends were his subject; he recorded their lives without any distance, literally as if he was one of them. He photographed them in smokey spaces full of mirrors, during passionate embraces, handing around on the street, in their rooms, sleeping or dancing frenziedly to compelling jazz music. His photos were raw, direct, velvety black in tone, his standpoint very close, faces and bodies filling the image. A couple of years later Love on the Left Bank, the book in which he arranged his Left Bank photos in the form of a photographic novel and presented them to a shocked public, appeared in four international editions.

There are curious parallels between particularly this early work of Van der Elsken and that of Nan Goldin, parallels which can also to some extent be traced in the courses of their lives and mentalities. Nan Goldin was considerably younger when she, equally from an aversion to petty bourgeois narrowmindedness, left her parents' home at the end of the 1960s and found a new family in a milieu of artists and transvestites where drink, drugs and free love were the rule. At the alternative art academy that they attended, in apartments, on the street and in clubs and bars she made theatrical, glamourous and at the same time dreamily romantic photographs of her friends, at first in black and white, but very soon in colour, images full of references to fashion photography and film stills. In 1978 she moved to lower Manhattan and found her own approach there, in part influenced by the raw street photography of Lisette Model and Weegee: frankly intimate, very close to her subjects, and full of empathy. In ever-changing combinations in the slide show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, these depict an era on the basis of her essential themes: sexuality, relationships and identity. Like Van der Elsken in Paris, Goldin photographed her environment as an insider, not as an assignment for an external client, but out of an inward need, as a way of trying to come to grips with her own life. In her own words, her work is "a diary that I let others read... My images arise from relationships, not from observation."

posted by neel master at 12:32 PM

Monuments of the Future: Designs by El Lissitzky
posted by neel master at 9:47 PM

it's been more than sixteen days since the last goffmania post. i will not speak for the other contributors, but my own absence can be partly explained by my recent and consuming committment to weightlifting and a protein-rich diet. this program is hard to defend, revolutionary-politics-wise, but I manage by convincing myself that, behind the veneer of cheery healthful improvement-oriented compliance, this obsession is marked by the same excess, nihilism, and will to self-destruction that marks more conventional forms of "resistance."

i suppose this is a fatally solipsistic conception of politics, but what are you gonna do?

i've begun a new temp job, this one at the Rich People's Special Treatment Department of a large national bank. no giant windows, no herman miller aeron chair, so I can't say it's the greatest job in the world, but it's simple. yesterday, the department manager gave me a t-shirt that has been vacuum-sealed into a plastic pouch (like this) that bears the shape of the company's logo. vacuum-sealed I'm saying. this is a fascinating object I have. i'm entertaining several fantasies about what will happen when I finally decide to release the shirt. sometimes I imagine an audible gasping sound, sometimes no sound. sometimes I actually endow the object with some sort of motive force of its own, so that it does not simply expand, but actually blooms uncontrollably out of the pouch, extruding through the spaces between my fingers.

enough of this silliness. let's get to some content.
posted by neel master at 9:57 AM