Nan Goldin Devil’s Playground

The Devil’s Playground presents a major collection of photographs by Nan Goldin. Since the 1980s Nan Goldin has consistently created photographs which are intimate and compelling – they tell personal stories of relationships, friendships and identity, but simultaneously chronicle different eras and the passage of time.

This book features a significant body of new work by Goldin, including photographs from series such as Still on Earth (1997–2001), 57 Days (2000) and Elements (1995–2003), many of which are previously unpublished. Laid out in sequences by Goldin herself, like a diary, the material is both courageously candid and affirmative. The photographs are grouped into themed chapters and between these are interspersed a number of texts, poems and lyrics by prominent writers – including Nick Cave, Catherine Lampert, Cookie Mueller and Richard Price. The Devil’s Playground is the first major book to be published on Goldin’s work since 1996 and is her most significant to-date. It brings to light the source of Goldin’s inspiration and her life as a prominent contemporary artist.

Nan Goldin is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading photographers. Nan Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. in 1953, and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. At the age of eighteen she began to photograph her family and friends—whom she considered her extended family—in New York, Boston, Provincetown, London, and Berlin. She has since lived in New York, Bangkok, Berlin, Tokyo and Paris, amassing an extensive body of work that represents an intimate and compelling photographic portrait of our time. First published in 1986, her Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a contemporary classic and one of the most influential series of photographs of the 1980's. It was originally presented as a slide show accompanied by a rock soundtrack and brought an intimate, even amateur, use of photography into the arena of contemporary art. It is a pictorial journey, documenting, with total candour, Goldin’s ‘extended family’ of Bohemian friends, drug addicts, transvestites, clubbers and battered lovers.

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