Nan Goldin "The Hug"

I think that Nan Goldin's work is a very intriguing body of work. The intimacy that she is able to achieve with her subjects shows through her work strongly. The article said that her series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency consists of 700 slides. I think it's very inspiring to see someone who is so heavily involved and so committed to one specific theme/body of work.

On the second page, Alexander talks about showing Goldin's image The Hug as a stand-alone image or as part of a slide/book. I feel like he was more intrigued by the image alone, but I think it says more as a part of a series or slides as Goldin originally showed the work. Alexander talked about how in the image, it is a moment of time showing a hug and viewers aren't completely sure of the content. Alexander spoke of a slide show being almost ephemeral in its quality, which I think adds a lot more symbolism and depth to the images. Relationships, both those shown in the images and the ones that Goldin has with the subjects, are often just as fleeting as a slide show. I also believe that a body of work shown together gives a lot more meaning to each separate piece by giving the meaning of the whole piece.

When reading Alexander's analysis of The Hug, I felt like it was a bit of an over analysis. I think there were aspects of her images that Goldin considered, but most of them seem to be so “in the moment” that aspects like the way the hair of the girl in front is covering the couple, and the stack of papers on the shelf are things that I'm not sure Goldin noticed in the instant of the capture. To me it seems like she was much more in the moment and concerned with capturing the magic of the moment and the intimacy and not the little tiny details.