Nan Goldin and Daido Moriyama Response

Both Nan Goldin and Daido Mariyama are contemporary photographers whose focus in photography is basically the everyday and the ordinary in their lives. They both have very different lives to begin with, and their approaches to documenting these also varies.

Nan Goldin started out photographing her drag queen friends, and then progressed into taking pictures that explored "external behavior, sexuality, gender identification, and the condition of being human." She strove to capture and portray the ability to survive and how difficult that can be. She wanted to make a record of real life and so used those closest around her - her friends and lovers - as her subjects. But what made her photographs especially interesting was that although she was behind the lens of a camera, she wasn't separate from her subjects and the activities that they were doing. She was a part of them, part of everything that was going on, which gives her images a very deep sense of reality that cannot be conveyed through anything posed or staged.

Daido Moriyama, on the other hand, focused more on his surroundings and the way people interacted with and within their environment. He just simply walks around the city and "forms appear in his field of vision." Similarly to Nan Goldin, he was also interested in "dirty" things as he put it. But a major difference I think between Goldin and Moriyama is that even though some of their imagery portrays things, ideas, and lifestyles that the most of society would see as taboo or even inappropriate, Mariyama referred to these images as "dirty," whereas Goldin thought of her photos as a part of normal, everyday life.

I do really like though how Moriyama uses such a small compact camera when photographing. He justified this with the explanation that people act different when you roll up with some giant, professional, expensive looking contraption, and he really wanted his images to be candid. I really want to get a small little film camera like that and bring it to the Green Door, or other parties, and record, kinda Nan Goldin style the goings on of college life. Whenever I do go out, I usually have a crappy digital camera with me, but I really would like to be able to take the images that I get into the dark room and work with them in the same way the I do with photographs that I spend much more time composing and thinking about normally.