Lucie Elven at the LRB:
Goldin’s sharp eye makes her stories simple, but it doesn’t make them easy. Sisters, Saints and Sibyls (2004-22) is a tribute to her elder sister, Barbara, who was institutionalised when she hit puberty and killed herself aged eighteen. A few years later, Nancy – as she was then – ran away from home. She was fostered and in 1968 landed in a ‘hippy free school’ called Satya, in Massachusetts. She spent as much time as she could at the Brattle Theatre and the Orson Welles cinema in Cambridge. The school had a grant from Polaroid, which was based nearby, and Goldin was one of the students given a camera. ‘Photography,’ she said recently, ‘was a way to walk through fear.’ As a teenager she was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.
more here.
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