Back in 1972, Nan Goldin was walking through downtown Boston when she came upon three trans women that would become her entrée into another world. As Goldin watched Ivy, Naomi, and Colette crossing the bridge near the Morgan Memorial Thriftshop, she immediately became infatuated with their beauty and their poise, following them with a Super 8 camera, making a video as they walked.
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Soon thereafter David Armstrong, Goldin’s closest friend, started to perform at The Other Side, Boston’s premier drag bar. Goldin accompanied him and was transformed. “I was eighteen and felt like I was a queen too,” she wrote in an essay published in her 1993 seminal monograph, The Other Side, which Steidl recently reissued in an expanded volume featuring additional images and texts.
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“Completely devoted to my friends, 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 as women, but as something different—a third gender that made more sense than either of the other two.”
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