Nan Goldin used flash. Not as a last resort. As a first choice.
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, her landmark slideshow and eventual photobook documenting her life and the lives of her friends through the 1970s and 1980s, is lit almost entirely by direct on-camera flash. The light is flat, frontal, unforgiving. It bounces off walls and skin and the surfaces of cheap apartments and produces a quality of illumination that is specific to a particular kind of intimacy – the kind that happens late at night, indoors, between people who are not performing for anyone.
Flash as Honesty
Photography culture has a complicated relationship with flash. Natural light is considered more honest, more beautiful, more serious. Flash is considered harsh, unflattering, the mark of a photographer who did not plan well enough to be somewhere with better light.
Goldin’s work makes a different argument. In the world she was photographing – the bedrooms, bathrooms, bars, and kitchen tables of her friends in New York, Boston, and Berlin – natural light was not available at the hours she was working. The hours were late. The spaces were small. The light was whatever the apartment had, which was usually not much.
Flash, in this context, is not a compromise. It is the light of the situation. It says: this is what it looks like when you are here, at this hour, in this place, with these people. The flatness of it, the way it removes shadows and renders everything equally visible, is exactly the quality that makes it appropriate. There is nothing hidden in a Nan Goldin photograph. The light does not allow it.
Colour Temperature and Domestic Space
Goldin’s colour work is saturated and warm, and the flash is part of why. Direct flash in a tungsten-lit room produces a specific combination: the flash renders the subject at daylight colour temperature while the ambient light in the background goes warm orange. Skin tones pop. Eyes are bright. The background recedes into warmth.
This is not a technical accident. It is the specific optical product of flash in domestic interiors at night, and Goldin understood it intuitively rather than technically. She was not thinking about colour temperature. She was thinking about her friends. But the result is a colour palette that is completely consistent across decades of work because the conditions that produced it were completely consistent.
The Snapshot as a Formal Choice
Goldin has described her work as the snapshot aesthetic taken seriously. The snapshot – someone’s birthday, someone’s face across a table, two people in bed — is the most common form of photography and the least respected. It is considered unsophisticated, accidental, the opposite of art.
Goldin’s argument, made not in words but in thirty years of consistent practice, is that the snapshot is the correct form for the subject matter she was working with. Her subjects were people she loved, in moments of ordinary and extraordinary intimacy. The formal distance of a considered, carefully lit, deliberately composed photograph would have been a lie. The snapshot told the truth.
Flash was part of this. A snapshot uses flash because you are indoors and the light is low and you want to see the person’s face. Goldin used flash for the same reasons, and produced work that looks like the most serious photography of the late twentieth century because the form was appropriate to the content.
Three Questions Worth Asking Before You Go Out
What does the available light in your situation actually look like, and are you working with it or against it? Goldin worked with the light she had. The late-night interiors, the cheap apartments, the bars – she did not try to make them look like something they were not. The light describes the place.
Does your chosen light source tell the truth about the situation? Flash tells a specific kind of truth – everything equally lit, nothing hidden, the subject rendered plainly. Natural light tells a different kind of truth. The question is which truth your subject requires.
What form does your subject matter actually call for? Goldin chose the snapshot because it was honest. The choice of a photographic form is not neutral. It implies a relationship with the subject. What does yours imply?
Using BYgo for Goldin Conditions
Goldin worked almost entirely in artificial light, indoors, which sits outside what BYgo plans for directly. But the transitional conditions BYgo tracks — dusk, low available light, the window between daylight and full dark — share the quality that Goldin was working with: insufficient natural light that forces a decision about how to supplement it.
If BYgo returns a low light forecast for your city and you are planning to move indoors or into spaces lit by artificial sources, Goldin’s approach is the reference. Bring flash. Use it directly. Do not apologise for it.
Further Reading
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), published by Aperture, is the essential text. The slideshow version, set to music and originally shown in clubs and bars, is available in documentary form. I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996) collects retrospective work with critical essays.
Part of the How They Saw It series — exploring how the photographers in BYgo’s shooting briefs thought about light, time, place, and conditions. Next: Martin Parr on Weather.