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This is an expanded and updated version of Nan Goldin's seminal book The Other Side, originally published in 1993. There will be a revised introduction by Goldin, and for the first time the voices of those whose stories are represented. Now being released at a time when the discourse around gender and sexual orientation is evolving, The Other Side traces some of the history that informs this new visibility.
The first photographs in the book are from the 1970s, when Goldin lived in Boston with a group of drag queens and documented their glamour and vulnerability. In the early eighties, Goldin chronicled the lives of transgender friends in New York when AIDS began to decimate her community. In the nineties, she recorded the explosion of drag as a social phenomenon in New York, Berlin, Bangkok and the Philippines, photographing their public personas while showing their real lives backstage. Goldin's newest photographs are intimate portraits, imbued with tenderness, of some of her most beloved friends. The Other Side is her homage to the queens she's loved, many of whom she's lost, over the last four decades.
About the author
Nan Goldin is one of the most eminent photographers of our times, and today lives and works between New York, Paris and Berlin. Given her first camera at the age of 15, she began taking Polaroids of herself and those around her. In 1972 she moved in with a group of drag queens in Boston, starting her lifelong passion for photographing her queer and transsexual communities. In 1978 Goldin moved to New York City, where she presented slideshows in nightclubs and underground cinemas; her best known, "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," was published as a landmark book in 1986. In the nineties Goldin relocated to Berlin where she published
A Double Life with David Armstrong and the first edition of
The Other Side. In 2000 she again moved to Paris, where she was invited to create site-specific works at the Louvre and now Versailles. In 2018 Goldin and her colleagues founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a direct action group fighting the pharmaceutical companies and advocating for addiction treatment in the mounting opioid crisis. The book has been an important medium for Goldin over the decades; her publications with Steidl include
The Beautiful Smile (2008) and
Diving for Pearls (2016).
