Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror

Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror accompanied the photographer's 1996 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was the first museum survey to present two decades of her work as a continuous visual diary.

The book gathers photographs from Goldin's years in Boston in the 1970s through her move to downtown New York. It includes images from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, self-portraits made during and after an abusive relationship, portraits of the transvestite and transgender friends who appear in The Other Side, and pictures documenting the toll of AIDS on her circle, among them the death of Cookie Mueller. Elisabeth Sussman curated the exhibition with David Armstrong. The 491-page volume reproduces hundreds of images with essays and interviews by Luc Sante, Marvin Heiferman, David Wojnarowicz, and J. Hoberman, and was co-published by the Whitney Museum and Scalo, Zürich.

Goldin (b. 1953) began photographing friends and lovers in Boston's queer subculture before moving to New York's Bowery in the late 1970s. Her style is unposed and confessional, treating the camera as a form of memory. I'll Be Your Mirror followed The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) as the fullest institutional account of her practice. Its title, taken from the Velvet Underground song, has stayed attached to the intimate portraiture running through her later books and exhibitions.