The Devil's Playground: 0000

Product Information

C. in 1953, the artist spent her early childhood in a typical residential neighborhood of the great American suburbs. 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.

She has since lived in New York, Bangkok, Berlin, Tokyo and Paris, amassing an extensive body of work that represents an often disconcertingly seductive photographic portrait of our time. While looking at the pictures, I wanted to almost identify myself with the voyuer, wanting to see what I see in private. 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. 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. There was nothing indicating the feeling of discomfort and ‘the uncanny’ at first, but the more I read through the pictures, the more uncomfortable I felt.

Valerie in the taxi, Paris, 2001 by Nan Goldin is a large format silkscreen limited print edition of 100.

These 500 pages of beautifully reproduced colour pictures constitute a moving soulful and surprisingly optimistic record of the work of a genius. Over half of the pictures were created since 2000 and after her move from New York to Paris, where she currently lives. Sometimes she does not decide what she thinks of a person until she has photographed that person: and so photography provides her with a tool to free her fears and a guide for ‘translating’, grasping and understanding her own life. In the intensely haunting images of this “ Devil’s Playground“, the sky and the sea are not totally separate, and the air becomes thick.Format: Cibachrome Sheet size: 406 x 610 mm (16 x 24 inches) Image size: 356 x 533 mm (14 x 21 inches) Box: 689 x 464 mm (27 1/8 x 18 1/8 inches) Condition is new! By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.

And so while still a teenager, she began to shoot ‘snapshots’, thousands of images, like most young people did during the 1970s and 1980s – before computers. 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. It comes in a specially made box together with an original Cibachrome print, also signed and numbered by Nan Goldin.This is the Special Collectors edition of The Devil's Playground, limited to 100 copies, SIGNED and numbered by Nan Goldin. Goldin wants to remember her personal life in every detail; people encountered, experiences shared, emotions felt, relationships that endure over time.

Being surrounded by other people while observing such photos seems almost like unacceptable, but I still went through the pictures with awe how interesting the moments captured were and how uncomfortable I was feeling while watching them. In recent years, Goldin also has photographed magical landscapes like the intensely blue sea in a grotto in Capri, the Stromboli volcano steaming at dawn, ex-votos in Somma Vesuviana, or the smoking tar pits of Solfatara near Pozzuoli.Since the mid-1990s, Goldin’s images have become more tender and more infused with light, more about connection than alienation. At first, the book introduces itself with pictures of ocean and nature in general, which are like the calm before the storm.