Nan Goldin.

Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin took pictures of her friends. They were, and possibly still are, members of an "outcast" society - they dealt with addictions, violence, disease, and the emotional turmoil of being misunderstood. This photograph is called "Gotscho Kissing Gilles (Deceased), Paris 1993". In the image, Gotscho leans over Gilles' hospital bed to kiss him on the day he died of AIDS. Nan Goldin talks a lot about how the AIDS epidemic snuck up on the country and her circle of friends, and how suddenly people she knew started dying of the mysterious disease, even though she had subconsciously convinced herself that her friends would survive. She claims that watching her friends die helped her to end her powerful cocaine addiction. She said, "I went into detox, partly because I wasn’t able to show up for my friends who were sick. Somebody had said to me, ‘How can you be killing yourself when your friends around you are dying?’ And that woke me up."

Nan photographed this image in the hospital where Gilles died, so she didn't have control over the lighting or set decoration. But for me everything in the picture contributes to the feeling of emptiness and misery. The sickly, green lighting that reflects off of everything, including the men's skin, the bare white sheets, the white wall, and the one power cable coming down the wall which to me, represents the life that is about to be cut short - all of these details contribute to the despair of the photograph.

In this image Gilles looks like he has already died, but I couldn't find a credible source that explained the photograph well enough to know whether he was still alive when the picture was taken. The picture is incredibly moving to me, because recently I have been very interested in the topic of death. I think the moment when a person actually died is fascinating. I want to know exactly what happens in that moment. So, I was originally drawn to this image because I can't tell if Gilles is alive or not. Either way, it's a heart-wrenching image and is classic Nan Goldin style - photograph the pain, the unattractive, the illegal, the frightening. Because it's real life, and that's what people need to see.

I know that this quote is not relevant to this image, but I thought I'd share it anyway. I think it's subconsciously how I was feeling when I photographed myself during my "Fear" project last fall. I think this is why a lot of people explore self-portraiture.

"I photograph myself in times of trouble or change in order to find the ground to stand on in the change."

- Nan Goldin