Nan Goldin

5 Pages 1137 Words

Nan Goldin’s contribution to the epidemic of AIDS has been her friends.

Through her visual diary of photography, she gives a human face to AIDS. Known as the

“gay cancer” upon its widespread discovery, many of Goldin’s friends or members of

her extended family (that she refers to lovingly as her tribe), were afflicted by this

unforgiving disease. One of the most memorable of her works about AIDS is The Cookie

Portfolio. It is the narrative of Cookie Mueller. In the accompanying text, Goldin says

she “thought that if I photographed someone enough, I could never really lose them.”

(Goldin, I’ll Be Your Mirror, 256). But has admitted that when she put the portfolio

together it made her realize how little photography did because it could not save her

friend.

The first three images I have selected are from The Cookie Portfolio (Goldin, I’ll

Be Your Mirror, 256-273). The first two, Cookie laughing, NYC 1985 and Cookie with

me after I was punched, Baltimore, Md., 1986, show Cookie Mueller as a friend. Even

though she is alone in the first image, she is engaged in genuine laughter with someone

outside of the frame. She is a part of the world, engaged in it and very much involved in

it, as an actress, a writer, a mother, a lover, and as a friend. She is especially portrayed as

a friend in the second image. Nan Goldin has just been punched by another photographer

at a convention. Mueller stands by her side with a fierce loyalty. She also holds onto

Goldin’s shoulder in a protective, motherly way.

Even as she is an actress, a writer, a mother, a lover, and a friend, she is also a

woman with AIDS. It is in the last image of Mueller that one begins to see the isolation

that begins to take over. It is a self-imposed isolation as well as one that society contrives

upon those who are different. In Cookie being x-rayed, NYC, October...