Image of the Day

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Nan Goldin, Self-portrait in blue bathroom, London, 

1980 (cibachrome,* 30 x 40 in.) 

On view at the Matthew Marks Gallery booth at the Frieze art fair, London, Oct. 11-14.

*I had no idea what this was. From wikipedia:

[Also known as is ilfochrome, cibachrome is] a dye destruction positive-to-positive photographic process used for the reproduction of film transparencies on photographic paper. The prints are made on a dimensionally stable polyester base as opposed to traditional paper base. Since it uses 13 layers of azo dyes sealed in a polyester base, the print will not fade, discolor, or deteriorate for an extended time. Accelerated aging tests conducted by Henry Wilheim indicated the product resisted fading under display conditions longer than any other known photographic color material. Characteristics of Ilfochrome prints are image clarity, color purity, as well as being an archival process able to produce critical accuracy to the original transparency.

You Are Not Alone

.You Are Not I still photograph by Nan Goldin

Saturday's New York Times had an great short article about the long-lost Sara Driver film You Are Not I. Driver had thought that her own badly beat-up copy was the only one in existence, but a clean copy was recently found in the Morocco apartment of Paul Bowles, who wrote the short story on which the film is based.

The movie – shot in six days near her parents' house in western New Jersey, with an unlikely cast that included two friends, the writer Luc Sante, little known at the time, and an equally unknown photographer, Nan Goldin — developed a following.... The film was named one of the best movies of the 1980s by a critic in Cahiers du Cinéma. For Ms. Driver, the film’s rediscovery has been like opening a time capsule of the No Wave independent-film scene, which flourished in New York in the late 1970s and early ’80s. It included directors like Jim Jarmusch (Ms. Driver’s longtime romantic partner and the cinematographer and co-writer for You Are Not I), Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, Bette Gordon, Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) and even Kathryn Bigelow, of The Hurt Locker fame, who made her first short in New York in 1978 (featuring the odd pairing of Gary Busey and the French semiotician Sylvère Lotringer). It was a tiny film world where favors and friendships often stood in for the money no one had.

You Are Not I has been screening at festivals and hopefully will be on DVD soon. Here's the only short clip I could find on the web:

Image of the Day

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Photography by Nan Goldin for Australian label Scanlan & Theodore. Click here to see the whole shoot (ignore the phrase "grunge glamour").

Moment to Moment

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Awhile back, Emily and I watched Variety, a 1983 film directed by Bette Gordon and starring Sandy McLeod as Christine, "a normal girl" who takes a job as a ticket taker at a porn theater in Times Square.

Nan Goldin Variety Booth, New York City, 1983

Nan Goldin co-stars as Nan (the movie seems to have been inspired by her work and definitely feels like The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in motion). Cookie Mueller makes a few appearances and Spalding Gray is audible as an obscene phone caller. Will Patton plays Christine's sort-of boyfriend; Luiz Guzman plays José, the manager of the theater; John Lurie did the score. It's a quintessential, exciting/foreboding document of early '80s New York and worth owning if you're into that kind of thing. Here's the trailer: