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A HUMAN FORM, pale and blurred, lies half-submerged in a tub of water. Eyes closed, hands semiclasped, the arms disappearing into the murky water around the edge of the frame, this human subject barely registers the light and shadows reading on her skin. Centered in the frame, the subject's moment in the bathtub is bathed entirely in a dirty green light analogous to the water in which her body lies. The only other color that registers is the near-death yellow of the subject's lips, nipples, and knuckles, the contours of her ears; we can know, somehow, from this that the water in the tub is lukewarm. But other than that, there is nothing to know about Nan Goldin's image of Ryan in the Tub, Provincetown, 1976 (fig. I).1 We can barely tell if Ryan is female or male, nor can we decipher what comprises her surroundings other than the chipped enamel bathtub. We cannot know who Ryan is or what she does, and yet it is of fundamental importance that Goldin captures her as a semicorpse, disappearing into the dim reaches of the water as her exhaustion dissolves into and infuses the air of the frame. It is tempting to say that Ryan is sick because she appears pale, thin, discolored, and half-conscious. She may be. Her half-death in Goldin's 1976 photograph does not suggest, or deny, that Pat Ryan is alive today; her very un-life suffuses every corner of the image, save, perhaps, for the bright spot of one tooth. "It's very important," writes Goldin, "for me to trace people's histories before I lose them."2 Goldin's prescient photograph does not document the life of Pat Ryan; it spans and gives body to the history of Pat Ryan. Extending into the future, the photograph, which tells us nothing about the individual Pat Ryan, is instead a vessel for the sadness, exhaustion, and gradual disappearance of an entire world.
Goldin began her career in the late 1960s, photographing a group of friends at the alternative high school she was then attending. Even these teenage snapshots evince Goldin's commitment to creating a community by making images of it. In the 1970s, Goldin focused her camera on the queer and, specifically, transgendered friends who had by then become...