Noriko Furunishi (Born 1966 in Kobe, Japan) is known for her otherworldly depictions of deserts, mountains, ridges, and riverbeds through a combination of traditional and digital photographic techniques. Many of her photographs have vertical formats and layered compositions and recall traditional Japanese and Chinese landscape painting. Rather than provide a fixed point of view, Furunishi’s work invites the viewer’s eye to wander across the photograph, allowing the photographic image to freely recede and advance.

Furunishi took the source photographs for Untitled (Grey Dry Stream) near Death Valley, California, using a 4 x 5 viewfinder camera; she photographed several different locations, each from multiple angles and positions. She then scanned these negatives into a computer, using the digital files to compose and collage multiple views. With digital technology, the landscape becomes a flexible medium that Furinishi can manipulate at will—eliminating details, adding others, mixing perspectives, and even blending different locations or times of day. Nature’s vibrant colors and varied textures are the raw materials she uses to create her compositions. Untitled (Grey Dry Stream) presents a disorienting, dreamlike view of the world. It hints at terrain or topography we may have visited or seen in a photograph; at the same time, it moves beyond this familiarity and suggests another dimension beyond our sight or time. The photograph is part of her Landscapes series, in which space and earth are warped, twisted, and distorted, confounding viewers’ points of view.

Nan Goldin (Born 1953 in Washington D.C.) is known for candid photographs that capture intimate moments in the lives of her friends and family. When she visited Tokyo in 1992, however, she was struck by the beauty of the city and people and for the first time photographed strangers on the street: “I sensed change in the air, things boiling up from underground, people coming out, and women emerging with new attitudes.” She returned to Tokyo in 1994 to work alongside her Japanese counterpart, the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Together, they published an artists’ book of their photographs of Japanese youth, titled Tokyo Love. In the book, Goldin reflects on the similarities between her formative years in the US and the rebellious Japanese youth she encountered in Tokyo, and remarks, “I fell in love with face after face. What started as a documentary project emerged as a journey back into my own adolescence, a rebirth of innocence, a time before my community was plagued by AIDS and decimated by drug addiction, a return to the garden.”

Many of the images in the Tokyo Love series celebrate youthful energy and romance as well as the subjects’ evolving and fluid sexuality. Takaho After Kissing, Tokyo is a sexually charged portrait of a young man reclining on a leopard-print sofa wearing only white underwear and a fishnet scarf. Glancing sideways, he smiles widely, red lipstick smeared across his mouth, capturing the emotionally charged state “after kissing.”

For over three decades, Nan Goldin (Born 1953 in Washington D.C.) has been making documentary-style photographs of intimate moments, creating a rich trove of images of contemporary life. Most of her subjects are close friends and family members, who pose boldly and comfortably in front of Goldin’s camera.

From Here to Maternity explores the archetypal mother-child relationship through twenty-four photographs taken between 1986 and 2000. These tender and striking images of parenthood show women breastfeeding and bathing babies, and changing their diapers. The dense arrangement of images is an unusual format for the artist, who tends to display her photographic prints as independent works. Included in the assembly is a piece in the ICA/Boston collection, Ulrike, Stockholm, 1998, a portrait of an infant that is reminiscent of historical depictions of Jesus as a child. The photograph of a water fountain in Amalfi, Italy, with water spouting from a figure’s breasts, makes a connection to other iconic depictions of maternal figures. Interested in filmmaking, Goldin is known for presenting her photographs in slideshows accompanied by music. The most famous of these, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), was first exhibited at the ICA in 1985. The deliberate sequencing of From Here to Maternity is reminiscent of the slideshow format, and the title references film history by evoking the 1953 classic From Here to Eternity.

From Here to Maternity complements other works by Nan Goldin in the ICA’s collection, contributing to a fuller representation of this important contemporary artist. It builds on an impressive array of collection works by prominent contemporary photographers, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Roe Ethridge, Noriko Furunishi, and Boris Mikhailov.

Renowned photographer Nan Goldin (Born 1953 in Washington D.C.) has a long association with Boston and specifically the ICA/Boston. In 1985, the ICA presented Goldin’s legendary The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, one of her first museum exhibitions, and has shown her work numerous times since. Lil Laughing, Swampscott, MA was part of a 2006 gift of photographs from the collection of Lillian and Hyman Goldin, the artist’s parents.

Sitting on the edge of a bed, the artist’s mother laughs as she grips “stress balls,” an element that inserts tension into the familial scene. Lil’s expression lies somewhere between hysterical laugh and primal scream, an edge often evoked in Goldin’s photographs.

An influential artist known for her seemingly spontaneous, personal photographs of family and friends, Nan Goldin (Born 1953 in Washington D.C.) finds the unique and intimate embedded in the ordinary. Goldin has a long and significant history both in Boston and with the ICA/Boston: she studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and has been exhibited at the ICA numerous times since 1984.

Goldin’s work has been celebrated for its “uncanny attention and attraction to the drama and the commonplace of life,” as Elizabeth Sussman wrote in the catalogue essay for Goldin’s Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996). Bruce in the Smoke, Pozzuoli, Italy captures the artist’s ability to depict everyday theatricality, representing a highly stylized poetic strain, with its almost monochromatic palette and the obscured, crouching subject. In contrast with Goldin’s characteristic diary-like images, this photograph seems more formally conceived. Bruce in the Smoke, Pozzuoli, Italy celebrates the individual at the same time that it uncovers the inevitable solitude of the self. The light and smoke that surround the figure simultaneously reveal his presence and obscure his identity, offering hope and consolation at the same time that they expose the isolation and anonymity of the lone man, Bruce, on a beach in Pozzuoli, Italy.

For over forty years, Nan Goldin (Born 1953 in Washington D.C.) has created a visual diary of her closest friends and relatives, documenting the remarkable and at times difficult moments in everyday life. Lovers embrace, performers and drag queens wait backstage, and family members meet at death beds in Goldin’s corpus of work.

For an artist who became known for raw scenes of her and her friends’ lives, Honda Brothers in Cherry Blossom Storm, Tokyo is perhaps a slight departure and surprisingly joyful. The artist spent time working in Japan in 1994 working on her renowned Tokyo Love series, in which she photographed the underground scenes of Tokyo. This particular photograph captures a moment of delight, as the two boys stand amidst a shower of swirling cherry blossoms. The photograph captures the blossoming of the cherry trees in springtime in Tokyo, a fleeting instance and the resulting joy.

 The artist expressed her desire to have a selection of photographs from her parents’ collection come into the museum’s permanent collection. Honda Brothers in Cherry Blossom Storm, Tokyo is part of the generous gift of Lillian and Hyman Goldin. 

Photographer Nan Goldin (Born 1953 in Washington D.C.) is best known for intimate portraits of herself, her family, and her friends, and is acclaimed for her distinctive ability to capture the surreal aspects of the everyday. She was a teenager in Boston, attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and then moved to New York City in the 1970s, documenting the city’s scene and often turning the camera on herself.

Fitting into Goldin’s oeuvre of diary-like photographs, Self-Portrait on the Train, Germany is a closely cropped image of Goldin gazing out a train window. This self-portrait can be seen a metaphor for the artist’s entire oeuvre, which captures the passing landscape of her life as viewed through the lens of her eye/camera. In Self-Portrait on the Train, Germany, Goldin depicts a quiet moment of contemplation, isolation, and anticipation. While laying bare the solitude of the self, Goldin also celebrates the individual ensconced in her inner world as well as the landscape that passes by as she travels between places and times.