Nan Goldin: The Other Side
Edited by David Armstrong & Walter Keller
4to. pp. 144. profusely illustrated. hardcover boards. dw. (near fine - some light wear to head of spine & rear top edge of dw). New York: Scalo Publishers in association with the D.A.A.D Artists-in-Residence-Programme, Berlin, [1993].
First Edition.
ISBN-10: 3905080389 / ISBN-13: 9783905080384
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Originally published on the occasion of the exhibition Jan Holden 1972-1992 at daadGalerie, Berlin, September/October 1992.
Ever since the early 1970's Goldin has lived with and among drag queens, documenting both their glamour and their struggles. The Other Side is her very personal declaration of love and gratitude to these drag queens, who showed her a way out of the captivity of pre-packaged, socially prescribed identity. As she put it: "The pictures in this book are not of people suffering gender dysphoria but rather expressing gender euphoria.... The people in these pictures are truly revolutionary; they are the real winners in the battle of the sexes because they have stepped out of the ring." In contrast to much of the early 90's drag queen mania, The Other Side has brilliantly passed the test of time: Goldin's photographs are as beautiful, moving, and vibrant as ever, heralding the utopian promises of a world where gender has stopped being a prison-a vision that remains as vital and acute as it was when the book was first published.