Jimmy Paulette and Tabboo! Undressing, NYC
Artist
Nan Goldin
(American, born 1953)
Date1991
MediumCibachrome print
Dimensionssheet: 101.6 x 76.2 (40 x 30 in.)
ClassificationsPhotographs
Credit LinePartial gift of Edward Osowski in honor of Brian Paul Clamp with additional funds from the Eliza S. Paine Fund
Terms
Object number2013.2
Label TextFor more than 30 years, Nan Goldin, who trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has been documenting her world through intimate images of close friends and acquaintances – her ad hoc family – performing life as it is lived before her omnipresent camera. Goldin’s empathy for her subjects has resulted in photographs that are candid (sometimes brutally) yet loving, and capture moments that tell stories of friendship, desire, and their aftermath. Self-reinvention is a frequent theme that runs through her images. Here, drag queens Jimmy Paulette and Tabboo! who have been the subjects of numerous of her images are photographed not in a public setting or in full regalia but in a moment of private transition and in the ordinary surroundings of their domestic lives.
She wrote, “My desire is to preserve the sense of people’s lives, to endow them with the strength and beauty I see in them. I want the people in my pictures to stare back.”
ProvenanceGift of the artist to Stuart Ward, New York, NY, about 2005; to ClampArt Gallery, New York, NY, 2013; Museum purchase from ClampArt Gallery, 2013
On View
Not on view
