The Devil's Playground: 0000

Product Information

Each is signed and numbered by Nan Goldin and comes with a special edition of The Devil's Playground that is beautifully bound, also individually signed and bound, signed and numbered. She has been mentioned several times in connection to my artworks (mostly photography) with the feeling that can be felt from the photos which influenced me to go take a look at the library in one of her books titled The Devil’s Playground. Sometimes she does not decide what she thinks of a person until she has photographed that person: and so photography provides her with a tool to free her fears and a guide for ‘translating’, grasping and understanding her own life. She has since lived in New York, Bangkok, Berlin, Tokyo and Paris, amassing an extensive body of work that represents an often disconcertingly seductive photographic portrait of our time.

In the Times Square bar where she worked to earn money, or at underground cinemas and downtown clubs, she projected unique slide shows. Looking at all these lives, all these desires and moments of solitude induces in the viewer a sense of emotional overdose, something like looking at the details of every figure in a representation of hell in a Medieval Last Judgment. The book and the print come in a specially made box together with an original Cibachrome print titled "Jens' Hand on Clemen's Back", also signed and numbered by Nan Goldin.Looking through a camera placed in people’s houses and rooms to observe the usual moments of their life.

Over half of the pictures were created since 2000 and after her move from New York to Paris, where she currently lives. She documents life as lived … It is fitting that the sequencing, which was laid out by Goldin herself, feels distinctly diary-esque: the profound insights often to be found in a seemingly abstract moment. Nan Goldin’s art evokes what personal memory fails to preserve – a person’s glance, the texture of skin, or the feel of flesh. Goldin wants to remember her personal life in every detail; people encountered, experiences shared, emotions felt, relationships that endure over time. She is most famous for her Ballad of Sexual Dependency photographs, a constantly changing slide show of approximately 750 photographs set to music.

Without reading about the book beforehand and finding information about what the series of photographs included in this book are, I jumped right into viewing. She became immersed in the intense climate of the East Village in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with its parties, music, film scene, drugs, and both heterosexual and homosexual sexual experiences. There was nothing indicating the feeling of discomfort and ‘the uncanny’ at first, but the more I read through the pictures, the more uncomfortable I felt. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.

This intense, roller-coaster ride through pain and pleasure is made bearable by the extraordinary beauty of the photographs. The underlying theme of survival – the artist’s own as well as that of others – is present throughout Goldin’s oeuvre – but it emerges forcefully in these recent pictures, after the loss of many of her friends to AIDS and drugs over the years.Format: Cibachrome Sheet size: 406 x 610 mm (16 x 24 inches) Image size: 356 x 533 mm (14 x 21 inches) Box: 689 x 464 mm (27 1/8 x 18 1/8 inches) Condition is new! Since the 1980s, Goldin has consistently created photographs that are intimate and compelling: they tell personal stories of relationships, friendships and identity, while chronicling different eras and exposing the passage of time. Laid out in diary-like sequences by Goldin herself, the material is both courageously candid and affirmative. Goldin's life and friends became the focus of her work - a diary of friends and lovers in Europe and America, in the underground and gay scene.

In recent years, Goldin also has photographed magical landscapes like the intensely blue sea in a grotto in Capri, the Stromboli volcano steaming at dawn, ex-votos in Somma Vesuviana, or the smoking tar pits of Solfatara near Pozzuoli. This book features a significant body of latest work by Goldin, including photographs from new series such as Still on Earth (1997-2001), 57 Days (2000) and Elements (1995-2003), many of which are previously unpublished. Since the mid-1990s, Goldin’s images have become more tender and more infused with light, more about connection than alienation.

And so while still a teenager, she began to shoot ‘snapshots’, thousands of images, like most young people did during the 1970s and 1980s – before computers. At first, the book introduces itself with pictures of ocean and nature in general, which are like the calm before the storm. Beautifully bound in red cloth, it was issued in a specially made box together with an original print entitled, "Guido floating, Levanzo, Sicily, 1999.