The Other Side: Nan Golden

Description

Publisher: Steidl
Hardcover : 142 pages
Language: English

Nan Goldin’s second book once again takes us to the edges of our society. Ever exploring the underground of our cultural sexuality, Goldin has been obsessed with “The Other Side,” transexuals and transvestites, since 1972. Rather than an attempt to unmask, what has emerged is a body of rich black-and-white and color work that portrays these people on “The Other Side” with an intimate attitude true to there own fantasies and conceptions of themselves. Produced over two decades, Goldin’s photographs also serve to document the recent move toward a commitment to survival under the omnipresent peril of AIDS.

This is an expanded and updated version of Nan Goldin’s seminal book The Other Side, originally published in 1993, featuring a revised introduction by Goldin, and, for the first time, the voices of those whose stories are represented. Published at a time when discourse around gender and sexual orientation is evolving rapidly, The Other Side traces some of the history that informs this new visibility.

The first photographs in the book are from the 1970s, when Goldin lived in Boston with a group of drag queens and documented their glamour and vulnerability. In the early 1980s, Goldin chronicled the lives of transgender friends in New York when AIDS began to decimate her community. In the ’90s, she recorded the explosion of drag as a social phenomenon in New York, Berlin, Bangkok and the Philippines. Goldin’s newest photographs are intimate portraits, imbued with tenderness, of some of her most beloved friends. The Other Side is her homage to the queens she has loved, many of whom she has lost, over the last four decades.