NAN GOLDIN (AMERICAN B.1953)
MISTY AND JIMMY PAULETTE IN A TAXI, NYC - 1991
£6,875
Auction: 16 April 2020 at 12:00 BST
Description
Cibachrome print, A.P., signed, titled, editioned and dated verso, unframed
Dimensions
71cm x 101cm (28in x 39.75in)
Footnote
Note:
Nan Goldin is an American photographer best-known for her deeply personal and candid portraiture. Her photographs serve to document herself and those closest to her, particularly the LGBTQ community and associated heroin-addicted subcultures.
Influenced by the fashion photography of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, Goldin's earliest photographic works are portraits of close friends glamorously dressed in drag. From the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, while she was living in New York, Goldin continued to socialise with and photograph people of ambiguous gender. She intended her work to be an homage to their beauty and courage; exploring drag and its ability to fulfil the fantasy of reconstructed identities.
When Goldin first encountered drag queens in 1972, she quickly became obsessed. She explained:
‘I was eighteen and felt like I was a queen too- they became my whole world.
Part of my worship of them involved photographing them. I wanted to pay
homage, to show them how beautiful they were. I never saw them as men dressing
up as women, but as something entirely different - a third gender that made more
sense than either of the other two. I accepted them as they saw themselves; I had
no desire to unmask them with my camera.’
(The Other Side, p.5.)
Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi is part of a large series of colour photographs of glamorous drag queens taken by Goldin in New York, Paris and Berlin in 1991. This picture was taken in a cab as her friends headed uptown to join their float in the New York City Pride March. Misty and Jimmy Paulette stare directly at the camera from the backseat of the taxi. The camera’s flash has illuminated their heavy makeup and shiny clothes. In 2018, Goldin collaborated with the clothing brand Supreme by contributing three of her photographs, Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC (1991), Kim in Rhinestones, Paris (1991), and Nan as a dominatrix, Cambridge, MA (1978) to their spring/summer collection.
Today, Goldin’s works are held in collections worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Modern, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.