Arielle/ Book Reviews

Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

The Ballad, 10x9” in size, filled with 130 color photographs, is Nan Goldin’s tale of the battle for intimacy between friends and lovers during the 80s. Love and sexuality are depicted in various instances, between lovers, between families, and the joys as well as toxic consequences are captured through Nan Goldin’s fearless vision. I see her vision as fearless because she is able to capture the moment of a sexual climax, the tension after a lover’s spat and the faces of battered women. These are moments in time most people do not dare take a photo of, moments that we normally don’t even witness unless it is our personal experience. Though there is usually one photograph on the front and back of each page, some pages are blank on one side with only one photo on the opposite page. The colors are rich yet something about the tone of the yellows and reds give the book an overall feeling that the photographs depicted are from a specific era, more specifically the 80s, the time when Goldin took these photos. Most of the photographs contain people, and even when there is not a visible person there is a suggestion that a human presence exists close by or somewhere we cannot completely see.

After flipping through the book front to back and back to front several times I tried to address the first feeling I got from the book. I felt as if Goldin portrayed intimacy as highly fleeting, and that misconnections occur more often than not. One image that stood out to me was the photo of the man and woman lying on the bed while the woman is still naked, her arms crossed over her body and the man sitting up behind her. To me this visually represented the idea of fleeting intimacy, the fact that these probably just finished having sex and yet now they couldn’t be any further from one another emotionally. This feeling was then counteracted by the images of Nan’s friends at parties, and the simple gesture of a hug seemed so refreshing after all the painfully familiar images of the crying women and a battered Goldin. I felt as if Goldin was trying to reveal this concept that intimacy is not always a positive consequence, that intimacy can turn around and become something completely unexpected. The cover of the book is particularly gorgeous, from the lighting to the intense look in her eye as her lover clearly diverts his attention away from her. It shows a sort of tug between the two players in the game of emotional dependency, one must pull and the other follows. I did not find the book to be positive or negative, just encompassing of all the different ways people seek human relations. Nan Goldin shows how we gain a different satisfaction depending on the intimacy we experience. A moment with our closest relative creates a different feeling than a moment with our lover in our bed. But is one more fulfilling than the other? It was this sort of question asked myself after reading The Ballad, which overall left me wanting to re-read the book over and over again.

Paul Graham’s A Shimmer of Possibility

Paul Graham’s collection consists of 12 separate books, each depicting stories of everyday life. The individual books have a different range of photographs; one of his books contains a single photograph and another contains as many as 60. The book I focused on was his first volume, which had around 12 photographs, plus or minus a couple. The book itself was 13.5x10.6x4.9 and the photographs were shot in color, using only natural lighting, which is apparent in the photographs he shot at night. Although Graham photographed two people for his first volume, he does not only show one man, then the other as a separate subject. After being introduced to the second man waiting for the bus he adds another image from the first homeless man from beginning of the book. The last photo in the book is so similar to the second to last photograph that I thought it was the same, but it is slightly different, which adds to the overall narrative of the book.

At first I had a very hard time understanding and appreciating Graham’s work. I felt like I couldn’t pinpoint the motivation behind the photographs collectively. Once I read the publisher’s description though, I saw the book in a whole new way. I could appreciate their story-like nature once I knew that the events and people in the book were not supposed to be outrageously glamorous or interesting; that his book was a narrative of the quiet things we see around us all the time. The photos of the homeless man’s hands holding the flowers, and the page where there are several photos of the flowers more and more entranced me. To me, Graham made something incredibly beautiful out of a situation I normally would have overlooked. It reminds us that while life continues at a fast pace, there are certain things that we should stop and take a closer look at. The style of the book made me feel as if there was no beginning or end, that the viewer just catches a glimpse of these people’s lives. There is no conclusion about these people or assumption; just a glance of what could be when we look a little bit closer. The shimmer of possible beauty in what seems to be a rather unassuming lifestyle. The other volumes are similar to the first, but I now greatly admire the use of so many different books so that viewers can pay closer attention to the short stories being told. As a whole the books are better when viewed in increments of time, in my opinion these should not be read quickly and all at once. Graham’s work is most effective when the viewer slowly re-assesses the images, and understands the relation of each specific photo to all the works as a whole.