Getty Images: Sean Gallup/Staff
Nan Goldin at her exhibition Poste Restante, c/o Berlin, October 2009.
Photographer Nan Goldin’s hair is a curl-fest that looks like a 1970s perm. It’s usually auburn in color but peroxide banana yellow has also been a past shade of choice. On anyone else it would look a little trashy; on Goldin it looks perfect, even when a slight frizz sets in. Like the wealth of imagery she creates, her visual poems of being, life doesn’t always come perfectly blow-dried, but we live and love it anyway. Neil Winokur’s 1982 portrait shows Nan in a windowpane-check cotton dress, pearl earrings, and matching necklace. Her chestnut brown hair is tied in a loose ponytail, and she looks far younger than the twenty-nine she is in the image. Later self-portraits present a different picture. Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984 presents Goldin post–domestic abuse, with bruised eyes—but with pearls still in place and shiny hair flowing across her shoulders like Charles II. In My Hall, Berlin (2013), she stands proud in a black bra, her jeans slung low, tummy unfurled over the waistband, and hair spiraling protectively down her back—red hot to match her lipstick.