Private Experience As Art

Choosing the case of the modern photographer Nan Goldin as my thesis originated from a discussion on the self photograph. My classmates and I discussed that now young people liked to take themselves'pictures, for example, a girl shooting a picture about her and a boy that had a close relationship, and this picture then was public on the line. Such an act thrown up many questions: When and where self photograph comes from? Why people would make their private experiences public with pleasure? For the sake of the answer, I read a quantity of documentary about history of photography. In this reading process, a female photographer Nan Goldin came within my range of vision, especially her self photograph which named Nan one month being battered. This photograph shows the aftermath of Goldin's stormy relationship with her boyfriend and is one of her most unsparing self-portraits. She has always seen it as a kind of warning against falling into the same trap again or again coloring memories with nostalgia. The injuries she received almost cost her sight in her left eye. So why she had the courage to public her boyfriend's mistreatment? Nan Goldin used her camera to record her alternate-family and herself in different period. Contrary to the contemporary female photographer Cindy Sherman, Goldin shoot the overpowering pictures of human helplessness. Through reading the texts about the history of photography, the ideas of history, the theory of the feminism, I try to understand the photographic language and art idea of Goldin's photographs in terms of the translation of the contradiction between the private experiences and art.