“ I want to be uncontrolled and controlled at the same time. The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember”.
Nan Goldin.
Against the criticism that her subjects are utterly unfamiliar and thus illegible for viewers who do not belong to her re-created family Goldin defends herself by explaining “the concerns I´m dealing with are universal…it´s about the nature of relationships”. Significantly, her first published diary was dedicated to the “real memory” of her sister Barbara Holly Goldin, who committed suicide in 1965. As Nan Goldin explains, this death left a traumatric imprint on her not only because it signified the loss of someone she was extremely close to but also because , she found she had also lost “the real memory” of her sister. She had irrevocably lost any recollection of “the tangible sense of who she was, her presence, what her eyes looked like, what her voice sounded like”. Simultaneously living and recording her life in images came to be her way of not repeating this double loss.
Taken from "Nan Goldin, Nabutoshi Araki and Diane Arbus" catalog from the exhibition at Sammlung Goetz, 1997.
