Goldin’s art is also one of the clearest manifestations of the vitality of the realist tradition today, that tradition in literature and painting where everyday life and the most humble of beings are represented with dignity. Looking at all these lives, all these desires and moments of solitude induces in the viewer a sense of emotional overdose, something like looking at the details of every figure in a representation of hell in a Medieval Last Judgment. Encountering the installation is a continuous emotion: the musical background is a collage of the eclectic music the artist loves; the projected images run along the wall in incessant fashion, from the photo of a birthday party in 1981, with Goldin seated in ‘her’ boyfriend’s arms, to other embracing couples, to friends who cry while they confide in Nan, to women in bathtubs, to people drinking: “It’s ultimately about how difficult it is to couple, says the artist, and how intense the need is.

Without reading about the book beforehand and finding information about what the series of photographs included in this book are, I jumped right into viewing.Laid out in diary-like sequences by Goldin herself, the material is both courageously candid and affirmative. The mysteryof loss, the depth of feelings it arouses, as well as the spiritual longing it triggers, are also expressed through powerful images of relics, ex-voto and religious images ( Skulls and Tears, Chapel of Salpétrière, Paris, 1999; Masectomy ex-voto, Madonna dell’Arco, Somma Vesuviana, 1996). I can say that I now see how people feel while looking my pictures as for some they could indicate the same exact feeling that I felt right at the moment of reading through the pictures. She became immersed in the intense climate of the East Village in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with its parties, music, film scene, drugs, and both heterosexual and homosexual sexual experiences. She is most famous for her Ballad of Sexual Dependency photographs, a constantly changing slide show of approximately 750 photographs set to music.

She has been mentioned several times in connection to my artworks (mostly photography) with the feeling that can be felt from the photos which influenced me to go take a look at the library in one of her books titled The Devil’s Playground. This new traveling exhibition, “Devil’s Playground”, began its tour at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2001 with subsequent venues at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Museu Serralves, Porto. It comes in a specially made box together with an original Cibachrome print, also signed and numbered by Nan Goldin. This book features a significant body of latest work by Goldin, including photographs from new series such as Still on Earth (1997-2001), 57 Days (2000) and Elements (1995-2003), many of which are previously unpublished.This monograph brings to light both the sources of Goldin's inspiration and her life as a prominent contemporary artist: she is internationally recognized as one of today's leading photographers. Voyuerism usually comes as a secreat obsession or sexual desire, that one experiences/enjoys by themselves.

However, in the postmodern era of the society of spectacle, it increasingly has become a technique for inventing a parallel reality, a fiction, or a simulacrum. This book features a significant body of latest work by Goldin, including photographs from new series such as Still on Earth (1997–2001), 57 Days (2000) and Elements (1995–2003), many of which are previously unpublished. This monograph brings to light both the sources of Goldin’s inspiration and her life as a prominent contemporary artist: she is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading photographers.

Photography also became a mechanism for working through loss, and for preserving this loss ad infinitum. These groups of pictures include themes titled “The Other Side”, “Recovery”, “AIDS”, “First Love”, “Mon am'”, “Elements” and “Still on Earth”.

The storm comes with personal family pictures, which at first looked like a usual family album pictures… but that was exactly the problem (? Titled “ I’ll Be Your Mirror“, it brought together powerful images expressing the range of joys and sorrows that her work had reflected up to then. In “First Love”, we see different moments of desire and tenderness in the life of her young nephew and his first lover ( Simon and Jessica on the Metro, Paris, 2001; Simon and Jessica Kissing in my Shower, Paris, 2001; etc. The Devil's Playground is the first major book to be published on Goldin's work since 1996 and it is by far her most important to date. Instead she is a modern photographer, someone who still believes in the capacity of the photographic image to represent the truth, to indicate and make a memorial from authentic experiences.

While looking at the pictures, I wanted to almost identify myself with the voyuer, wanting to see what I see in private. Born in Washington DC, Goldin grew up in Boston where she began taking photographs at the age of 15. Since the 1980s Goldin's photographs have been exhibited internationally, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museu Reina Sofia in Madrid. Valerie in the taxi, Paris, 2001 by Nan Goldin is a large format silkscreen limited print edition of 100.