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Lot Essay
In Nan Goldin’s 1991 work, Jimmy Paulette and Tabboo! in the bathroom, NYC, features one of the artist’s most often photographed subjects, a drag queen named Jimmy Paulette. Photographed during a seminal year in the artist’s oeuvre Goldin’s photographs from this time present a photographic time capsule of a microcosm of New York City. Goldin became immediately fascinated with draq queens upon her move to New York City in the early 1970s. In her striking photographs, she sought to highlight this highly expressive and intriguing set of the New York culture.
“I was eighteen and felt like I was a queen too … they became my whole world. Part of my worship of them involved photographing them. I wanted to pay homage, to show them how beautiful they were. I never saw them as men dressing up as women, but as something entirely different - a third gender that made more sense than either of the other two. I accepted them as they saw themselves; I had no desire to unmask them with my camera. (N. Goldin, quoted in The Other Side, 2005 p.5.)
“I was eighteen and felt like I was a queen too … they became my whole world. Part of my worship of them involved photographing them. I wanted to pay homage, to show them how beautiful they were. I never saw them as men dressing up as women, but as something entirely different - a third gender that made more sense than either of the other two. I accepted them as they saw themselves; I had no desire to unmask them with my camera. (N. Goldin, quoted in The Other Side, 2005 p.5.)