As a rube at photography, night and indoor photography has always been my bane. It just never looks right, especially if I use the flash. The skin always look overexposed and pasty. What astounds me about Nan Goldin’s photography is how she has absolutely mastered the art of indoor photography. Many of her most technically accomplished and vivid shots take place on the inside, in the dark of a bar or a friend’s living room. Of course there are frequent blurry and out-of-focus shots, but this (premeditated) technical amateurishness only heightens the skill she displays in many other indoor shots

The collection is prefaced by a very long and rambling essay by Goldin about the goals of her collection. I don’t know if the photographs live up to her ideas. The photographs appear to be so intensely personal, so filled with hidden meaning unavailable to the casual viewer, it is hard to square them with an overarching goals. Unlike, say Larry Clark’s Tulsa, it’s hard to get any sense of who the members are of any group. There is a real tension between the outsider status of the viewer, who cannot ever comprehend the entirety of the world displayed in the photos, and Goldin, whose entire world is composed of this little group. I do wonder if the way the social group is walled off from the viewer contributes to the perception of this collection as an elegy to a gay subculture now lost to AIDS. My sense of the cultural signifiers of the LGBT scene at that time could be off, but I found it mostly adjacent to queer culture rather than finding meaning directly from it. Maybe it is also because the whole collection is framed in terms of heterosexuality. One of the first photos in the book, which Goldin in her introduction notes is programmatic, shows waxes of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Frozen in time, the two are forever apart together. The cover also displays Goldin’s boyfriend smoking a cigarette as he sits on the bed where she is laying. She stares out at him with suspicion and even fear. In fact, Goldin and Brian’s relationship, and its disastrous turn to abuse, provides an anchor of the collection. Other people come and go in Nan’s group, but her world is primarily defined by her relationship to Brian, and when that falls apart, her attempts to pick up the pieces with other men.

I definitely really love this book, and when I actually get my hands on enough money I will purchase my own copy instead of borrowing one from a library. It’s a book that rewards re-reading.