Phaidon publishes Nan Goldin's 'Le Terrain de jeu du diable'

Éditions Phaidon has released a monograph on Nan Goldin titled 'Le Terrain de jeu du diable', compiling hundreds of photographs taken over the past decade. The book is organized into 21 sequences, some of which were previously shown at the Centre Pompidou, while others are unpublished. The collection highlights shifts in Goldin's work compared to her earlier pieces from over twenty years ago. The camera retains its role as a medium mediating between self and world, self and others, and self and self, as seen in numerous self-portraits. The structure follows cycles from life to death—births, childhoods, families, aging—and opens and closes with timeless images: indistinct landscapes in mist or shadow approaching abstraction, and photographs of people floating in water, seemingly asleep or half-dead. Relics belonging to the deceased echo images of empty rooms. The work is marked by deep melancholy, with references to Italian Renaissance and American abstraction, suggesting that time has inscribed itself into a medium that once sought to escape it, erasing human presences to leave only traces or ghosts.