The Devil’s Playground

Description

Now available in paperback, this critically acclaimed book is the most significant and comprehensive publication of Nan Goldin’s photography. Internationally recognized for her intimate and compelling images, Goldin has lived and worked in Boston, New York, Berlin and in Paris, her current home, creating images of herself, her surroundings, her lovers, friends and family. Taking the form of a diary, the photographs are sequenced alongside texts chosen by Goldin, which include short stories, poems and song lyrics by leading curators, poets and writers. This results in a work that is intensely personal, with exquisitely beautiful photographs that are at times moving and enthralling, provocative and disquieting, sensual and uplifting. This book includes some of Goldin’s most recent work, with many photographs published here for the first time. At this new reasonable price, it is sure to attract many more viewers to Goldin’s impressive body of work.

Nan Goldin was born in 1953 in Washington, DC. She grew up there and in Boston, where she began to take photographs at the age of 15. In 1978 she moved to New York and then to Berlin where she lived and worked from 1991 to 1993. She currently lives and works in Paris. Since the early 1970s, Goldin has taken numerous photographs of her friends and ‘family’, which form a unique corpus of work. She is most famous for her Ballad of Sexual Dependency photographs, a constantly changing slide show of approximately 750 photographs set to music. Goldin’s life and friends became the focus of her work – a diary of friends and lovers in Europe and America, in the underground and gay scene. 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.

“You’ll be drawn in, turned on, disgusted, or in love with this absorbing book, which has a strange beauty of it own.”—Digital Photographer

“Her work is defiantly stripped bare – in The Devil’s Playground, reality bites.”—Elle

“This intense, roller-coaster ride through pain and pleasure is made bearable by the extraordinary beauty of the photographs.”—Time Out

“Goldin’s consistent theme shines through in all its accessibility. She documents life as lived… It is fitting that the sequencing, which was laid out by Goldin herself, feels distinctly diary-esque: the profound insights often to be found in a seemingly abstract moment.”—Pictured

“Testament to a community of loved and loving bodies.”—Time Out

“These 500 pages of beautifully reproduced colour pictures constitute a moving soulful and surprisingly optimistic record of the work of a genius.”—Diva

“For any Goldin fan, it’s a must-have.”—Digital Photographer

Additional information

Dimensions	1.75 × 9 × 12.825 in
Imprint	Phaidon Press
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780714847580
ISBN-10	0714847585
Author	Guido Costa, Nan Goldin, Nick Cave
Audience	General / adult