At first, I couldn’t find her. When a friend told me that the Yale University Art Gallery had a Nan Goldin on display, my eyes attuned to bare chests and bruises, bodies draped across beds, faces forgetting themselves in the mirror.
Sure, she was small, only around twenty-one by nineteen inches, but she wasn’t of a particularly standout size amidst the other photographs on the wall. They were smaller and larger; more colorful and saturated and more muted. I could have walked right past her.
It was a voice, his voice, that brought me over to her. A quick “I really like this one” to change my focus. And there she was. Slightly too reddish to be sepia-stained, she turned her head from me completely. It wasn’t turned just enough to divert eye contact, nor to sneak a quick glance at something that had caught her attention to the left, but turned so intentionally as to remind me that it was turned. As if she had been waiting for someone to come by, see her head turned away, and wonder what kind of escape she was yearning for.
Nan Goldin took “Variety” Booth, New York City, in 1983, ten years after her first solo exhibition, but three years before her first book of photographs, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency would be published. Goldin was 30 years old, and had already made a name for herself among New York City’s underground queer and post-punk and no-wave scenes. Her work was embraced for its grittiness, its unabashed vulgarity, and its honest depiction of how communities on the margins experienced the city.
“Variety” Booth, New York City, was not taken, though, amid the noise of the city. It is a photographic still from a film called Variety, which was directed in 1983 by Bette Gordon. The film tracks the story of a young woman who works as a ticket-taker in a pornographic cinema, and finds sexual liberation through obsession. Read: she becomes obsessed with porn. It plays on the tropes of film noir, but allows the woman to seek and experience desire. It was advertised as a “feminist Vertigo.” Gordon herself called it simply, “a story about looking.”
It feels wrong, or at least somewhat icky, at first, to see Goldin so evocatively photographing this false reality. Only three years later, in the introduction to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, she would write, “I don’t select people in order to photograph them; I photograph directly from my life… It’s as if my hand were a camera. If it were possible, I’d want no mechanism between me and the moment of photographing. The Camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex… There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.”
What happens then, when Goldin’s subjects are not her family nor her history, when the camera becomes an object laden with intention and the world of the subject is one that was completely fabricated? With Variety, there’s another level of voyeurism. For AnOther Magazine, Lucia Davis writes, “These images…blur the line between reality and fiction and further emphasize the connection and empathy Goldin frequently has with her subjects.”
Is this, then, manufactured empathy? Goldin’s photos appeared on the posters and advertisements for Variety, unlocking a new form of voyeurism as they were marketed to a public (albeit a particular underground public). Gordon’s so-called story about looking can’t possibly end at the big screen. She becomes a part of it. I guess that’s how it becomes her history. And in the wake of second-wave feminist anti-porn sentiments, this is a radical history, for both Gordon and Goldin.
It doesn’t seem that the story about looking has yet ended. Maybe I found someone or something in the sidelong glance of the ticket woman’s eyes, in the time I spent staring, waiting for her to turn her head back to me, meet my eyes as if to say it’s okay. You can feel desire too.
