Purple Art

[December 15 2016]

A preview of Nan Goldin’s new book “Diving for Pearls” Co-published by Steidl and Kestner Gesellschaft, out now!

“Getting a good picture is like diving for pearls. You take a thousand pictures to get a good one.”- Nan Goldin

Co-published by Steidl and Kestner Gesellschaft, “Diving for Pearls” is an exclusive collection of Nan Goldin‘s new and unpublished work. Invited by the Louvre, she photographed artworks of her choice at the museum and connected them to earlier photographs of her friends and lovers. She also shows us how unintentional photographic mistakes made with an analogue camera can produce touching, beautiful and sensitive photography.

In his text featured in the book, Glenn O’Brian writes : “I see Nan Goldin as a fierce leader of the real art resistance. She has never given up on beauty. She stuck to her guns and snuck it through as ugly beauty because she found it in such unlikely locales. Photography, capturing what exists exactly as it is at a particular moment, ordinarily looks old fast. Last year’s hair and makeup don’t make it into next year’s Vogue. But beauty can survive unmolested in the underground, where it lingers without asserting itself, and that’s where Goldin works. She finds beauty that doesn’t know itself, or parade it, or profit from its rarity.”

You can purchase the book here.