Nan Goldin- Berlin Work Exhibition and Scopophilia launch, Berlinische Galerie

It took a visit from a friend from Warsaw to drag me out of the house on a cold Saturday afternoon to see the last day of the Nan Goldin- Berlin Work 1984- 2009  exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie.

I didn’t know much about Nan’s works. She left her home when she was 14 and acknowledged her sister’s suicide as the catalyst for picking up the camera. Apart from death, another big influence on her photography was the colour and debauch of the underground  and the people who inhabit it. She spent some time in New York with drag queens and transvestites in the late 1970s, before heading to West Berlin at the height of the Cold War.

Bea with the blue drink (1984)

Her candid,unobtrusive style of photography captures her friends, as well as former and current lovers- every day people in every day situations. That feeling of connectedness and comfort the people have with their intimate environment is what gives her pictures that ethereal, timeless quality. The photos, the clothing and the decor may be over twenty years old, but the people are snapped frozen in time. One thing that struck me during the exhibition was her use of light and mirrors- light to contrast with the grey, winter shots of Berlin  and mirrors, as a tool for reflection not just for her subjects, but also for herself.

Self-portait in my blue bathroom (1991)

Marzahn housing projects, East Berlin (1992)

Taking this almost documentary- like photography and using it to chronicle  the eventual death from AIDS of one of her closest friends, Alf Bold, made this part of the exhibition very moving. Alf was one of Berlin’s first AIDS sufferers and fell victim to the disease.Not many modern photographers have gone out of their way to photograph death in such a raw form (perhaps  Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of Susan Sontag on her deathbed springs to mind). Yet I found the pictures of Alf’s decline from a lively man to human skeleton not as confrontational as I was anticipating. The photos were disarming and yet peaceful at the same time-  they seemed like more of a photo diary of sorts,as though Nan was accompanying Alf on this journey.

Nan herself was present later in the night to launch her new photo project “Scopophilia”, resulting from her spending several Tuesday nights alone in the Louvre, photographing Renaissance classic paintings and sculptures. Interestingly, she said during her presentation that she is not very fond of photography anymore, because it has gone too digital.As part of the editing process, she had to jump into the digital world for the first time,since for the last thirty years she said she had always edited using analogue slides.

Scopophilia

Nan Goldin once described her Berlin years as “magical” and said that some of her most debaucherous days and nights were spent in this city. I can relate to that.Surrounding herself with this colourful cast of characters, the men and women who came to play such an important role in her life and inspire the majority of her photos, Nan’s photos are also an elegy for her life and the person she was in Berlin during those years.