Votre panier est vide
Besoin d'inspiration ?
Rendez-vous dans le programme en ligne du GrandPalais
Article -
Nan Goldin and the No Wave, by Alice Leroy
On the occasion of the exhibition devoted to Nan Goldin at the Grand Palais until June 21, 2026, Alice Leroy, lecturer, researcher and film critic, offers a series of texts exploring her work through the lens of cinema. HHere, she looks back at the connections between Nan Goldin and the New York underground cinema of the 1980s, through several collaborations and figures from the No Wave scene.
"You call this art? I could have done the same thing" comments Nan Goldin in front of one of her photographs exhibited at the Hi Hat bar in episode 4 of season 2 of The Deuce (2017). In this series, David Simons and George Pelecanos recreate the atmosphere of Times Square between the 70s and 80s when the neighborhood was the realm of drug dealers and pimps. The Hi Hat, a fictional bar from The Deuce, is directly inspired by Tin Pan Alley, where Goldin worked as a waitress, and whose patron, Maggie Smith, encouraged her to develop the political dimension of her work. This cameo by the photographer becomes a double journey through time, returning her to the moment and place where her images were first shown.
The Hug, New York City, 1980
In 1983, while working at Tin Pan Alley, Goldin played herself in Bette Gordon's Variety. She advises young Christine, just arrived from the Midwest, to take a job as an usher in a porn cinema, a situation that will lead the young woman to explore her own voyeuristic fantasies in a trajectory symmetrical to that of James Stewart's character in Hitchcock's Vertigo[1]. Goldin also made a number of set photographs - two of which would become part of The Ballad: "Variety" Booth and Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, images of solitude that have passed from cinematic fiction to photographic slideshow.
This is not the first collaboration between the two women: in a 1981 short film, Empty Suitcases, an experimental prelude to Variety, Gordon filmed Goldin photographing underground filmmaker Vivienne Dick in a dizzying mise en abyme of the act of representing the female body (Vivienne in the green dress[2]). Dick had introduced Goldin to the filmmakers of No Wave, an experimental art movement rooted in the Lower East Side where musicians, filmmakers, visual artists and performers intersected[3]. Today, only the names of filmmakers Jim Jarmusch and Amos Poe tend to be remembered, even though a number of women directors left a strong mark, such as Sara Driver, who cast Suzanne Fletcher, Goldin's friend and model since adolescence, in You Are Not I (1981), or Lizzie Borden, director of a feminist trilogy including the cult Born in Flames (1983), utopia of an Afrofeminist insurrection in New York.
Borden’s third feature film, Working Girls (1986), shares its title with a section of The Ballad. Its main character, Molly, is a photographer - her images, which she develops herself in her bathroom, were taken by Goldin. Molly loves a woman and works by day in a brothel to pay their rent. Like Dick before her in Liberty's Booty (1980), Borden films prostitution as a working-class job, without reducing it to a moral issue or human tragedy. Sex is depicted as a place of asymmetrical power between sex workers, clients and madam. Borden, Goldin and Dick are all committed to showing ordinary lives, stories where the intimate and the political can no longer be dissociated.
Other information
Alice Leroy is a lecturer and researcher, and a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Alongside this, she works as a critic as part of the editorial team of Cahiers du cinéma and on the program L’Esprit critique on Mediapart. She is also an associate programmer at the Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou and at the Franska Film Festivalen in Stockholm.
Nan Goldin in the mirror of cinema
This article, written by Alice Leroy, is part of a series of texts exploring Nan Goldin's work through the prism of cinema, from her slideshows to her films, highlighting in particular her links with New York experimental cinema. Published fortnightly, this series offers an intimate, film-oriented reading of her work, in resonance with the exhibition Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well at the Grand Palais (March 18-June 21, 2026).
[1] Because it stages a woman tailing a man (Sandy McLeod following a moviegoer after a screening), the film has been described as a feminist remake of Vertigo by Hitchcock (1958), which shows James Stewart following Kim Novak through San Francisco.
[2] Unless otherwise stated, all the photographs mentioned are drawn from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
[3] Dick, herself a musician, for instance played in Beirut Slump with singer Lydia Lunch, a recurring actress in her early Super-8 films.
