Nan Goldin

Jimmy Paulette and Tabboo! in the bathroom, NYC, 1991 first appeared in Nan Goldin's 1992 book The Other Side-a compilation of photographs of drag queens taken in New York, Berlin and Asia beginning in 1972. "The Other Side" was the name of a Boston club frequented by transvestites in the early 1970s, and it was there that Goldin started taking photographs. Her work documents an alternative culture and lifestyle evocative of the emotionally intense work of other social photographers from Weegee to Diane Arbus to Larry Clark. Nonetheless, her work is ultimately a record of her life and friends. In Goldin's words: "For me taking a picture is a away of touching somebody-it's a caress. I'm looking with a warm eye, not a cold eye. I'm not analyzing what's going on-I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends." (Whitney, back cover)

Goldin's vision of the drag queen community she embraced (and that embraced her) is at once candidly personal and hopefully optimistic. At the conclusion of her introduction to The Other Side, Goldin writes: "The pictures in this book are not of people suffering gender dysphoria but rather expressing gender euphoria. This book is about new possibilities and transcendence. The people in these pictures are truly revolutionary; they are the real winners of the battle of the sexes because they have stepped out of the ring." (Goldin, p. 8)