Narratives: Personal Mythologies as Identities in the Time of Digital Era, Through the Work of Nan Goldin.
Today, our society seems to be centred on the figure of the individual and the concept of identity has become one of people’s main concerns. By looking at Nan Goldin’s practice, I will analyse contemporary ways through which people build a personal mythology as identity.
The term ‘mythology’ comes from the ancient Greek mythos which means a tale, a story – Herodotus links it to the idea of lie, of invention[i], it is from a distant source, and anonymously provided to us; and lógos: speech, word, related to the idea of truth, of rhetoric, and of an identified author.[ii]
Considering the narrow scope of this essay I will surface only briefly the factor of the Internet through the bias that the issues linked to photography has taken a physical and more radical shape with the Internet and social media.
I will develop my reflexion in two parts, firstly the making of an identity through aesthetic, in which I will explore the importance of photography as a way to archive one’s self, its role as a trigger for self awareness, and how both these factors lead to the emergence of aesthetic in one’s life. Secondly, I will explore the making of a persona, through the creation of a personal mythology.
The creation of photography in the 19th century introduced the idea of one’s life archiving, at least among the bourgeois class. Technical leads soon permitted the general public to benefit from it, notably with the creation and the sales of the Kodac (1888), the Instamatic (1963)[iii], and today when every phone has a camera integrated. Photography is linked to the ideas of representation, preservation, remembering, and to an extent understanding.[iv] As Christian Boltanski puts it during the exhibition Documenta 5 in 1972, ‘it’s a fight against death’, the attempt to ‘capture a moment, to keep hold of something’.[v] It is almost spiritual, or at least it is certain that photography captures something of the subject, a part of its identity.[vi]
Nan Goldin viewed photography as a way to both archive her life and to preserve, almost literally, her friends’ existence. Her practice is defined by the fact that she recorded, archived, ‘mirror[ed] her own life’[vii] through a specific and repetitive process: ‘constant picture taking’[viii]. This archiving process emerged following her belief, or tragic desire, that “if [she] photographed anything or anyone enough [she] would never lose them”.[ix] Tragic because, along with Boltanski, they came to realise that photography “doesn’t stave off mortality, […] it doesn’t preserve a life.” [x]
Nowadays, individuals have access, through their phone, to a camera and thereby to the possibility of taking immediate photographs; and via Internet and social media such as Facebook, to a virtual, unlimited space to stock their images. Facebook serves the function of a photo-album, except that the process of filling is easier and quicker. Indeed, no need to develop, print the negatives, just upload them. There are barely any costs. It serves the purpose of preserving one’s memories, through archiving a constant picture taking of one’s life. The omnipresence of photography and social media has made this process of archiving a central – if not the central – issue in one’s life.[xi]
Jean Baudrillard declares that photography in itself implies the action of being watched, and recorded. It acts as a mirror stage; it makes the subject aware of himself as an individual and therefore projecting his ego. This means that one will act as the subject he thinks he is or wants to be.[xii]
It is quite apparent in Nan Goldin’s practice, as Elisabeth Sussman notices, her “snapshots reveal a transformation from unaware adolescence to self-conscious adulthood: Goldin’s friends cut their hair or let it grows, try on dresses and shoes: and as they pose for the camera, they are the person they dream of becoming.” [xiii]
People nowadays experience this mirror stage twice, through their constant use of photo-taking, and through the virtual space where they archive, publish them. As they publish their photographs on Facebook, they have the knowledge that, potentially, the photographs will be seen by a community.[xiv]
“The age of photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of private into public, or rather into the creation of new social value, which is the publicity of the private”[xv]
Thus, as developed previously, photography and Internet act as triggers to make people aware of themselves. They bring public into private: metaphorically when it comes to photography, and literally in the case of social media. From that on to present one’s self properly becomes a necessity and ‘sublimation through aesthetic then becomes an acceptable end’. [xvi]
This idea of aesthetic appears in Goldin’s practice within the content, as her friends – the subjects – through the lens of her camera, start constructing themselves to fit a personal ideal of ‘glamour’[xvii], of ‘fashion trash elegance’[xviii]; and on the form, as Goldin discovering colour and artificial light, make them almost systematic[xix], and thereby synonym of an aesthetic of representation.
Today, photography’s mirror stage effect has become literal with Internet/social media/Facebook. People’s photographs are published online, and are literally witnessed. People more than ever feel the necessity to present an idealised self, highlighting some traits, suppressing and creating some others.[xx] The idea is to reshape one’s self into a beautiful/aesthetical persona.
In his essay The Death of the Author, Barthes states two things: first, that an author never creates something new, the author only re-organises by combining/opposing different sources, he establishes this statement as a fatality. Secondly, that the meaningful unity of this assemblage of sources resides not in the origin: the author, but in the destination: the reader. And that even the reader’s interpretation is nothing but contingency and subjectivity, it is one among others whose fate is to disappear as soon as it arose.[xxi]
Nan Goldin in the process of creating a persona, a mask, embraces this fatality. She creates a narrative through a complex assemblage of History, she ‘chronicles the decadence of a later age – the punk subculture of urban bohemia’[xxii], and ‘the 70s/80s New York subculture’[xxiii]; and by ‘captur[ing] some of her friends over many years and accumulat[ing] their histories’[xxiv], of individual stories. Within her photographs, her ‘subjects’[xxv]/friends, plays with different iconographies from ‘near Edwardian Glamour’[xxvi] to emblematic figures ‘of disappeared elegance’[xxvii] such as ‘Cecil Beaton, Baron de Meyer’[xxviii] or ‘Hollywood movies of the thirties and forties’[xxix]. Finally, in the Ballad of Sexual Dependency, she incorporates ‘film stills from fictional work by women filmmakers’[xxx], thereby mixing up fiction within reality.
All these sources are for the viewer a multitude of collective mythologies[xxxi], which evoke for everyone a singular/subjective thought, memory. Therefore the interpretation one could have of Goldin’s photographs, artwork or persona is detached from Goldin as a person, or Goldin’s life.[xxxii]
Brock Bazon concerning the Individual Mythology section within Documenta 5, reflects on ‘the problem of the question whether the picture itself is the same real as those things which are shown in the picture’, therefrom he defines ‘two levels of reality: the picture itself, as a picture, and the things shown in the picture’. The narrative of the photographs, and the things that are shown in them exist in themselves, detached from the author.[xxxiii]Goldin’s artwork, this persona she built, then detached from her and thereby existing in itself, become something of a myth, a personal mythology, something having the potential to talk to anyone. Today, people’s creation of a persona/personal mythology on social media is, on the same scheme, detached from them; it exists in itself. Quite literally, Facebook decided in 2011 to adopt a format timeline, archiving the user’s life or personal mythology since its creation (the creation of the Facebook account (Facebook uses the term birth)) until the present moment. [xxxiv] People’s process of creating a persona, is noticeably comparable to Goldin’s, because it manifests mainly through the use of picture-taking, which issues have not changed: creating a narrative using collective mythologies. However, by virtue of being accessible, this process of creating a narrative is radically more coherently developed on the Internet/Facebook. Indeed, as in the Ballad of Sexual Dependency, in which Goldin’s process of sequencing, organising, reorganising individual photographs into ‘affective whole[s]’[xxxv] (ever-changing ‘slideshows’[xxxvi]) creating ever-changing ‘imagistic narratives’[xxxvii], enriched by ever-changing music and songs (thereby lyrics/texts) selections. Facebook gives individuals the same possibility, with a wider scope: photographs can be gathered into ever-changing albums, coupled with a selection of interests – or as Facebook puts it: ‘likes’ (of books, Facebook pages etc.), of music, songs or captions, all the tools necessary to create an ever-changing persona, a personal mythology in constant evolution.[xxxviii]
As developed previously, the personal mythology created is detached from the individual, and exists in itself. Therefore the question of who is speaking, who is the author should not even arise: “‘what does it matter who is speaking’, someone said ‘what does it matter who is speaking’”[xxxix] Samuel Beckett declared, quoted in Foucault’s essay What is an Author?.
However, the question of authorship matters if one would compare the Internet/Social media to a sort of panopticon, as detailed in Panopticism: The individual acknowledges the potentiality of being watched[xl] - partially because he is himself in the role of the observer/guardian: browsing people’s Facebook profile pages. If he takes the risk to act reprehensively, and get caught, then he will be punished. In his essay What is an Author? Foucault introduce the idea that “discourse [in our case persona/personal mythology] are object of appropriation”[xli] meaning that the ownership of a piece (oeuvre) is subsequent to penal appropriation. The author then becomes subject to punishment.
If considered through the lens of surveillance and discipline, it is necessary to link a name, an author, an individual to the book/artwork /personal mythology, in view of the possible necessity to punish. We can then reflect on why society, today, is so inclined to promote personal mythologies, myths around the individual, or simply authorship.
Author: Kien Denier, 2016
[i] Anna Francisca Nilsson, ‘Fragments: an exploration of the significance of myth related to the sense of self’, p7
[iii] Magali Nachtergael, ‘Individual Mythologies, Digital Mythologies?’ (originally in French ‘Mythologies Individuelles, mythologies numériques’), p2
[iv] Rodney Carter, ‘Photography and Personal Mythology’, p4
[v] Christian Boltanski, in, ‘Documenta 5’ (Jef Cornelis, 1972)
[vi] Patrick Perez, ‘No Picture! No Picture!’, in the Journal des Anthropologues, p2
[vii] David A. Ross, in, Nan Goldin, ‘Nan Goldin:’, p15
[viii] Elisabeth Sussman, ‘Nan Goldin: I'll be your mirror’, p27
[ix] Stephen Westfall, Nan Goldin by Stephen Westfall, BOMB magazine no.37, 1991
[xi] Rodney Carter, ‘Photography and Personal Mythology’, p9-10
[xii] Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Perfect Crime’, p87
[xiii] Elisabeth Sussman, ‘Nan Goldin: I'll be your mirror’, p27
[xiv] Rodney Carter, ‘Photography and Personal Mythology’, p11
[xv] R. Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida, Reflection on Photography’, p98 (italics mine)
[xvi] Magali Nachtergael, ‘Personal Mythologies in the 70s: the Birth of Aesthetic of the Self’ (originally in French ‘Mythologies Personelles dans les Années 70: la Naissance de l’Esthétique de soi’), p4
[xvii] Elisabeth Sussman, ‘Nan Goldin: I'll be your mirror’, p28
[xx] Rodney Carter, ‘Photography and personal Mythology’, p11
[xxi] Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, p5
[xxii] Elisabeth Sussman, ‘Nan Goldin: I'll be your mirror’, p28
[xxiii] Vivien Opiolka, ‘Personal photography: outlines of its emergence in history, a search for its power and the deconstruction of an assumption regarding its use in fine art’, p33
[xxiv] Vivien Opiolka, ‘Personal photography: outlines of its emergence in history, a search for its power and the deconstruction of an assumption regarding its use in fine art’, p34
[xxv] ‘subject’ as defined by Baudrillard in The Perfect Crime.
[xxvi] Elisabeth Sussman, ‘Nan Goldin: I'll be your mirror’, p28
[xxxi] David A. Ross, ‘Nan Goldin: I'll be your mirror’, p15
[xxxii] refers to the ideas previously developed from Barthes’ The Death of the Author
[xxxiii] Brock Bazon, in, ‘Documenta 5’ (Jef Cornelis, 1972)
[xxxiv] Magali Nachtergael, ‘Individual Mythologies, Digital Mythologies?’ (originally in French ‘Mythologies Individuelles, mythologies numériques’), p9-10
[xxxv] Elisabeth Sussman, ‘Nan Goldin: I'll be your mirror’, p32
[xxxviii] Roland Barthes, ‘I like I don’t like’, in ‘Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes’, p116
[xxxix] Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in ‘Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology’, p205
[xl] Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’, in ‘Discipline and Punish’, p200-201
[xli] Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in ‘Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology’, p211-212
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