How to Wear a Cocktail Dress, circa 1983: The Photography of Nan Goldin

"My work originally came from a snapshot aesthetic...Snapshots are taken out of love to remember people, places and shared times. They're about creating a history by recording a history."

     --Nan Goldin

When we considered 1983 as a theme, the first things I thought of were Nan Goldin's photographs, which have captured a certain element of that time that is most engaging. A catalogue of her retrospective at the Whitney, aptly titled I'll Be Your Mirror, is a gorgeous compendium. But for this issue, I specifically thought of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Originally a slide show made for friends in the early '80's to be viewed at Tin Pan Alley, a club in New York City, the intimate documentation of this series is now a very public document. By the time I first saw this book in '89, '83 was already history. But Goldin's photos offered me a kind of mythic vision, an anthem of passion. The subjects were all glamorous and utterly human, and suggested to me myriad characters and narratives. I poured over the book while shirking at my shitty job at a library, and later, again, at a bookstore job. The photos were key in figuring out who I was, what I'd been and how I could make meaning in the moment. Here's what I learned:

Lesson 1: Any dress, anytime. When I found her photos, I'd sworn off fashion magazines, though I've always had a love/hate relationship with fashion journalism. The influence of fashion photography is obvious in Goldin's work, or, rather it seems she has influenced fashion photography. In her work there is the true power of clothing-- and this is not to trivialize her work by any means. Life deserves a costume, and in these photos the subjects wear the detritus of the 20th century comfortably, as if it were skin. And skin, also, has never been captured with such sensuality and integrity. Flesh is textured and nuanced, itself a garment-- the most precious.

Lesson 2: Seek artificial light. The light of Goldin's photos is always interior light, artificial. Her use of flash and Cibachrome create saturated, acidic colors, making them stoned-vision bright and giving flesh an earthy luminance. Her camera flash lights up the dark night of the soul. It's the redemptive gesture of the photo itself, her loving gaze, that complicates the voyeurism one feels when taking in the photos.

Lesson 3: Gender is mutable. The exhilaration of seeing drag queens, cross dressers, transsexuals and transvestites for the first time on the streets of San Francisco made me realize that femininity was subversive, and to dress up could be an act of truth-telling, even while it took the form of artifice. Her photographs (some in Ballad, but most in a book called The Other Side) capture this contradiction powerfully: the incongruity of cocktail dresses worn like housecoats, pancake makeup as impenetrable skin, the grace of a fragile gesture or glance in a dangerous world.

Lesson 4: The bed is a universe. Many photos are taken on a bed, and some are just of beds-- unmade, bearing marks of dreamers and intimacy. At the time I first found her work, this was profoundly resonant, as I had not really relinquished my adolescent devotion to my bed as my island. Even though I had my own room in an apartment in the lower Haight, there was little else in the room but the bed and a box of books. The best of my life took place there and I had need for little else.

The bed is the stage where some of our most profound dramas are played out, with others and within ourselves. We spend much of our lives there and the bed takes on our smells, the shapes of our bodies. We begin life and end it there.

Lesson 5: Death will mark you. In 1965 Goldin's sister committed suicide, and this death would haunt her. Preserving the memory of others became a priority, because memory is a stay against death. One of her most moving photos is one of Cookie Mueller in her coffin. But to understand its power one must see other photos of Mueller in sunny Italy with Goldin, or blotting tears at her wedding, to see the powerful trajectory of a life cut too short.

There is a desperate energy in these photos, fueled by drugs and alcohol. To say these deathwish forms are not glamorous would be a lie. They are. The human capacity for self-destruction, desire for moments of obliteration, is in every one of us, despite the anti-drug hysteria's insistence that it is not.

And we need each other, sometimes desperately, and it might be the death of us. In the late '80's many of Goldin's friends would die of AIDS. Her photos are also a document of mourning, and how this plague has affected all our lives.