The photography of Nan Goldin offers audiences a kaleidoscopic narrative of the breadth of the human experience. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present, Goldin captures her world as it unfolds before her, resulting in a diaristic account of her life and the people and places that define it. Treating her camera as an extension of her own body, “creating a history by recording a history,” Goldin shields her memories from revision or erasure by preserving them permanently in photographic form. The result is an unvarnished, intimate, and honest glimpse into a full life that has played out in New York City, Boston, Provincetown, and abroad, against the backdrops of nightclubs and drag bars, hotel rooms and hospitals, and more. By experiencing Goldin’s work, we bear witness to her reality and that of the people who inhabited her evolving surroundings, with whom she formed a kind of alternate family—a chosen family. The intimacy of the photographs not only provide a window into the lives that surrounded Goldin, but validate the many twists, turns, and paths that occur in all of our lives, resulting in a deeply personal, yet resoundingly universal experience of art and humanity.
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Portland Museum of Art
7 Congress Square Portland, Maine 04101, USA
October 06, 2017 to December 31, 2017
