Now It's All So Flat

Nan Goldin isn't exactly one of my favorite photographers. Her photos are often technically crude and the worlds she bore witness to--NY in the 80s, junkies, battered men and women--have never been my worlds. I enter them with a certain distance. But her ballsiness is something I've always loved, her refusal to look away where others did, her sheer stubborn dedication to holding to on to the people and times that inevitably slipped away. From what I understand, her sister died young and Goldin thereafter took photos to keep from losing people ever again.

Predictably, the photos of hers I've liked the most are of transsexuals and drag queens. They're not exploitative. They're not about a freak show. They're just photos of her friends. They're honest in the way the rest of her photos are: blunt shots of people living their lives, in all their complications. And even though I don't know the people in these photographs, they produce in me a kind of anemic longing, maybe because it's so clear that Goldin herself is longing so profoundly to keep these people close. I may not be desperate to hold on to these people, but she is, and sometimes the easiest thing to feel is empathy because it requires of me nothing but a careful watch from the sidelines.

Goldin has a short piece in today's Guardian that made me stop cold. She sets forth what's maybe the saddest confession I've ever heard from an artist: "I don't carry my camera so much these days: I don't have the same relationship with it. I've never considered photography one of the higher art forms. Everyone takes photos; now even phones can. The whole issue of digital is so depressing to me; my process is gone. There were all kinds of unknown things that could come out in a photograph, things you didn't know were there until you saw it; now it's all so flat. But then I never really saw myself as a photographer."

Horrific, isn't it? Take away process from an artist and what do you have left? It's like Didion saying that she writes in order to know what she feels: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." You don't do the feeling and understanding parts first; you create so that you can find your way to any kind of understanding at all.

I'm imagining Goldin now pacing lower Manhattan without a camera and it IS depressing. I'm projecting too, of course, because I'm a writer who isn't writing (unless you count writing 8 legal memos a day, which I don't). Who is Nan Goldin now that she doesn't routinely carry a camera? Who am I when I go months at a time without making anything? Who are any of us but the stories we leave behind?