“Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin”

Curated by Lanka Tattersall with Rebecca Matalon

“I photographed whatever happened to catch my attention . . . any one of the thousands of chance events of everyday life,” wrote Brassaï in The Artists in My Life in 1982, at about the same time that Nan Goldin was prototyping the diaristic slide show that later became The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. A decade earlier, the posthumous monograph Diane Arbus had revealed the seldom-seen denizens of a world that moved in the same orbit as the secret Paris traversed by Brassaï in the 1930s and the louche haunts frequented by Goldin and her cohort in the late ’70s and ’80s. Curator Lanka Tattersall, with her finger on the pulse of today’s image-saturated media culture, brings these “Real Worlds” together with some one hundred photographs drawn from the three photographers’ seminal publications, as well as a digital presentation of Ballad. The catalogue places Tattersall in conversation with some of today’s most original voices in the realm of identity politics: Hilton Als, Maggie Nelson, and A. L. Steiner.