ONE MORE YEAR

Nan Goldin + Stephen Westfall for BOMB Magazine, 1991

• SW: When you were making your early work, you said how important it was to remember what you couldn’t remember. Now you can remember, but the camera has a kind of funny function as a surrogate memory and, in a way, it replaces memory.
• NG: I don’t rely on it in that way so much in the new work. I’m not wedded to memory in the same way. When I got sober I had a lot of amnesia, and it’s only coming back now. I don’t feel this need to remember anything now, anymore. It’s a great freedom in a way. Like I said in my text about Cookie…I’d always believed that if I photographed anything or anyone enough I would never lose them. With the death of seven or eight of my closest friends and dozens and dozens of my acquaintances, I realize that there is so much the photograph doesn’t preserve. It doesn’t replace the person and it doesn’t really stave off mortality like I thought it did. It doesn’t preserve a life.