A Double Life

This photographic album documents the past 20 years in the lives of the two artists and their "extended family." By way of introduction, Goldin writes about Armstrong and vice versa in two offhanded but meaningful tributes to their intertwined lives. The remainder of the book alternates Armstrong's black-and-white portraits and the mostly color snapshots and self-portraits by Goldin (e.g., The Other Side, LJ 5/ 15/93). High-quality reproductions and the lack of additional text reinforce the nonnarrative, slide-show quality of the work. The images are intimate, existential, and often disturbingly deadpan; yet they are pointedly unglamorous and anything but stagy. No one photo is more central than any other, whether it depicts the funeral of a friend who died of AIDS or a groggy woman reaching for a glass of orange juice on a night stand. Each moment in these scrutinized lives becomes important not only for its cruel ordinariness but because it is the moment that the picture was taken. A subjective diary has seldom been so universal. Recommended for all art and photography collections.