The Brooklyn Rail

APRIL 2022

All Issues
APRIL 2022 Issue
The Miraculous The Miraculous: New York

98. The Lower East Side (mostly)

After the suicide of her older sister, an 11-year-old girl decides that she will never let another memory vanish. She begins taking photographs of everyone she knows, firm in the belief that by photographing them she will never lose them. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, however, more and more of the friends and lovers who appear in her photographs are felled by drugs and AIDS. She realizes, one day, that almost everyone she has made a portrait of is now dead. The medium she turned to as a way to assuage her early grief has become a continuous record of mourning and loss.

(Nan Goldin)

Contributor

Raphael Rubinstein

Raphael Rubinstein is the New York-based author of The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). Excerpts from his recently completed book Libraries of Sand about the Jewish-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès have appeared in BombThe Fortnightly Review and 3:AM Magazine. In January 2023, Bloomsbury Academic will publish a collection of his writing titled Negative Work: The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.

close

The Brooklyn Rail

APRIL 2022

All Issues