The Devil's Playground - Hardcover

Cave, Nick; Costa, Guido; Goldin, Nan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714842230 ISBN 13: 9780714842233

Publisher: Phaidon Press, 2003

Synopsis

THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND is the most significant book published to date on Nan Goldin (b. 1953), one of the most prominent and influential contemporary photographers. It contains Goldin's latest works alongside earlier classics, including images from new series such as ELEMENTS, 57 DAYS, STILL ON EARTH, and FROM HERE TO MATERNITY, many of which are published here for the first time. This book is an intimate and compelling photographic portrait, telling personal stories of relationships and identity while chronicling different eras and the passage of time. Goldin's photographic sequences are interspersed with texts, poems, and lyrics by prominent writers.

About this title

About the Author:

Nan Goldin was born in 1953 in Washington, DC. She grew up there and in Boston, where she began to take photographs at the age of 15. In 1978 she moved to New York and then to Berlin where she lived and worked from 1991 to 1993. She currently lives and works in Paris. Since the early 1970s, Goldin has taken numerous photographs of her friends and 'family', which form a unique corpus of work. She is most famous for her Ballad of Sexual Dependency photographs, a constantly changing slide show of approximately 750 photographs set to music. Goldin's life and friends became the focus of her work - a diary of friends and lovers in Europe and America, in the underground and gay scene. Since the 1980s Goldin's photographs have been exhibited internationally, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museu Reina Sofia in Madrid.

From Publishers Weekly:

Dating mostly from 2000 to 2002, this latest collection of photos from '80s star Goldin broadens her exploration of intimacy to take in first loves and births, along with the usual chronicling of accidents and illnesses, drug addiction and recovery, age and loss among friends and family. Throughout this nearly 12"×9" collection, the body is always primary, and often unabashedly fleshy. The ease with which Goldin captures her friends and relatives showering, relaxing on a bed, or in the midst of lovemaking is impressive, establishing both the reality of the moment while simultaneously bathing her subjects in her loving, third-party glow. Texts include pieces by Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, along with New York downtowners John Giorno and the late Cookie Mueller. While Goldin's work is often compared to Diane Arbus's, in that both photographed the so-called "marginal" members of society, rather than using the lens as a distancing, voyeuristic tool, Goldin equalizes viewer and viewed. Through the lens of familiarity, the photo becomes less an exploitation than a connection. Homosexual, transvestite, straight, scarred, tattooed or simply uniquely shaped, everyone has relations-and Goldin does not exempt herself, as two sections in the book follow her struggle against heroin addition. While the 460 shots here are printed in gorgeous color, many of the photos are unfortunately situated across a two-page spread, with the central human figure often disappearing or elided into the gutter, at odds with the overall intention of the collection.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Phaidon Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0714842230
• ISBN 13: 9780714842233
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 504