Nan Goldin

1.Sharon nursing Cookie on her bed, Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA, 1989.
Like Cookie, Sharon was for many years a familiar subject in Goldin's photography. Her masculine beauty often made a perfect counterbalance to Cookie's exuberant and extremely feminine sensuality. This photograph, from the Cookie portfolio, catches these ex-lovers at a tragic time, marked by the progress of the illness that in a matter of months would cut short Cookie's life. It was Sharon who would nurse Cookie through the months when she could no longer even speak, even though the photograph on the wall testifies to Cookie's marriage to a man, after eight years as Sharon's lover.
2. Variety Booth, New York City, 1983.
3. Smoky car, New Hampshire, USA, 1979.
Inconsequential daily events, situations with no particular story behind them and the anonymity of repeated gestures (like smoking a cigarette or drinking a beer) ofter catch Goldin's eye. This shot turns on the contrasts between light and shade, interior and exterior. It shows a moment suspended in time and captures, as many of her images do, a sense of solitude and estrangement, even within a pleasure-filled situation.