Plinth

Goldin came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 80s for her close-up, lyrical portraits of queers and weirdos. Embedded within the underground cultures of an impoverished New York, she shot photographs of those who populated the punk scenes, dive bars, strip clubs, and communities in which she hung out, including queens, sex workers, bohemians, and junkies; the resonance of her work is in its deeply personal candour and off-the-cuff expressivity – a style borne out of touch, showing her intimacy with the people she captured.

Sisters, Saints, Sibyls contains photographs and videos from across Goldin’s life, predominantly taken by the artist with photos from her family archive. Across four distinct movements, it presents the viewer with her loss of her sister Barbara (when Barbara was eighteen and Nan just twelve) and the impact that these childhood traumas had on her later life.

In the first stage of the film, we see mediaeval images of Saint Barbara, whose father killed her for her devotion to the Christian God. The second comprises of Nan’s childhood, Barbara’s violent tension with her mother, and Barbara’s suicide. The third is made up of Goldin’s escape into the bohemianism that consumed her youth, until her voice announces 'Drugs set me free. Later they became my prison.' In the fourth and final movement, we see extensive photographs taken by Goldin in a rehabilitation centre. The film ends with the photographer visiting the grave of her older sister, having survived.

Across the piece the use of storytelling is loose. Images of distinct elements from Goldin’s life appear side by side, and an occasional voiceover from the photographer guides us to see the general shape of her life, while allowing each element to stand alone. The transitions between images, video, and stages of narrative are smoothened by a soundtrack of teenage rebellion and iconoclasm – including Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Jonny Cash, and an especially powerful use of This Mortal Coil’s cover of Tim Buckley’s ‘Song to the Siren’ near the film’s culmination.

It’s a painful yet capacious film. Goldin uses the event of her sister’s suicide to contemplate her own struggles, showing us the cigarette burns she inflicted along her arms while in rehabilitation. These personal images become portals through which the viewer can consider the social fate of women who go mad, get addicted to drugs, become institutionalised or incarcerated.

Sisters, Saints, Sibyls makes its arguments with care, exploring the brutal through a tenderness characteristic across the artist’s work. Throughout each sequence, we are presented with images of people we don’t know, or of places we can’t quite work out. If there is a story, it is one composed through allusion and inference. Through absorption in the images and the loose guide of the narration we can start to put things together, but also an understanding of what has happened can never fully determine the meaning of these images, standing as they do for a specific moment of time separate from narrative.

We know with each new image that we are witnessing something scarred, wounds that shrink when touched, more deeply-felt elsewhere. Equally, there is much in these images that escapes us – pain that we can never feel, more faces than we could identify, their histories unknowable, too. In this contrast between visual richness and narrative allusion, we might ask, why does Goldin share with her images and withhold in her story?

In the opening of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a documentary by Laura Poitras about Goldin’s life, we hear the artist say: 'It’s easy to make your life into a story but it’s harder to sustain real memories.' She makes a curious division. But it is precisely this tension within which Sisters, Saints, Sibyls situates itself. One can even perhaps read the film as Goldin’s response to having had a documentary made about her.

In contrast to Poitras’s film (where, like all documentaries and their authoritative character, it runs the risk of creating a commanding absolute), Sisters, Saints, Sibyls raises the dual purpose of Goldin’s images as both biographical and aesthetic. The photographer moves her images beyond documentary by making her life a part of something else.

Family photos, self-harm scars, sunken eyes rehabilitation centres, we look at Goldin’s documents. But Goldin gives them haloes. We see things on the surface knowing that much more emotional weight and depth is contained beneath them. And through this aesthetic transformation, and weight of unknowability, the images become memory pools to places we can never reach. As Goldin states in Poitras’s documentary. Real experience is not a story, 'wrapped up in simple endings.' Rather, life is 'what affects me now,' but we can always take the effects of life and turn it into something grander, something harder to grasp, something impossible to record.

By Ed Luker