Eartha, Nan, Nico

Someone sent me a copy of the 1995 documentary on Nan Goldin, I'll Be Your Mirror. I wasn't expecting much, and loved it very. Not even because of Nan, whose voiceovers are austerely singleminded, she does that photographer thing of presuming assent and lunging right at you—but for the fierce, warm matrix that her work stitches. Nan’s photographs famously encompass the lives of friends, lovers, collaborators. Their pictorial inscription has to be fierce, in that Nan is designed, at least she was back then, on taking life to its edge, and there, halting death. As anti-death votives, her artworks make a trade with time: they enshrine singularity and beauty in interpersonal enmeshment. They seem to say: enmeshment is okay if those involved are also suffering solitarily. The conceit of Nan's oeuvre is that it is willing to baldly, openly negate that which lies beyond her participation—in her sanctuary in-between of life and death, she owns specificity, relaying pathos almost by happenstance. The film is titled of course after a Velvet Underground song delivered by Nico and the soundtrack throughout echoes Nan’s artistic imperative, that, in a state of warbled before and after "maths", she doesn’t have to trust the world, just to reflect it back. The documentary ends with Eartha Kitt singing All By Myself / Beautiful at 40, which is how Nan shows herself and her subjects, sloshed at parties or stoic at funerals, very alive, gripping to life, and, in an important sense, alone.