I lived in a loft at 21 Howard Street in downtown New York for many years. I used the walls as my bulletin board, thumb tacking anything that inspired me: images from magazines, Polaroids, or drawings by well-known artists including a pencil rubbing of three pennies by Mel Bochner, a tiny drawing by Joel Shapiro, and a Richard Serra sketch torn from his notebook. I didn’t think the holes from my thumbtacks defaced them; I was living with the art.
When traveling back and forth to Los Angeles, I would sublet my loft and would store things in boxes until I eventually moved permanently to Los Angeles. Over time, the artwork and anything that might have become my archive was lost or destroyed, including many of the boxes, all except a small pack of images I traveled with everywhere. These are remains, my talismans, my memories, and now also pieces of a puzzle.
I don’t remember who took the picture above. I am walking at night carrying the only print of my film Born In Flames. I was likely on my way to a small screening, sometime before the film’s first official screening in Berlin, maybe at an art space, Franklin Furnace or The Kitchen. It must have been close to my loft on 21 Howard Street because I always had an old, beat-up Lincoln or Cadillac parked outside with a fake film permit that I would drive at night if I was traveling far. I have kept this photo for decades. It reminds me how “indie” I was then—producing, directing, writing, editing, driving people to and from locations on shoot days, carting my film prints around myself. This photograph also reminds me of who I was then; wearing bursts of color; walking confidently as if I knew where I was going.
Photographer Nan Goldin on her bed at 87 Bowery. Her eyes are closed, her hands crossed over her chest, her close friend, actor Suzanne Fletcher, watching over her. Nan’s loft was a warm haven for artists, filmmakers, theater people, those who needed somewhere to crash, some doing drugs. Although I was never part of Nan’s inner circle, I adored her and her work. She later shot the
stills for my film, Working Girls.
I don’t remember who took this Polaroid or if I was there when it was taken—sometime in the late 70s. I realized only years later it had been the inspiration for a sequence in Born In Flames, shot in a loft in the Mudd Club building with moody red lighting of women from the “Women’s Army” dancing, lounging, sharing a blunt—a wishful Utopian escape from their activist days. Only a few frames of that sequence remain in the film. These days, the Nan that I see in this Polaroid is a sleeping princess about to wake up, pick up her sword, and slay Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family.
I’m at a table with the production manager of Working Girls, Christine LeGoff. Christine looks bored as she does in every image I have of her working on the film. This was probably taken in 1985, sometime between post-production and the film premiering in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes, where it was picked up for distribution. Christine would have moved on to her next film, producing She Must Be Seeing Things, directed by my friend Sheila McLaughin, also the actress who blows up the World Trade Center transmission tower in Born In Flames.
What fascinates me about this Polaroid—again, I don’t know who took it—is how I’m dressed. It feels like a costume. I’m all in white with white earrings and dark glasses. I may have lost my contact lenses since vanity prevented me from owning any clear prescription glasses back then. Or, I may have been hiding; the prospect of going to Cannes terrified me. Soon after this photo was taken, I would start my travels back and forth to Los Angeles so many times that I would lose my loft, most of my things, and any foothold in the downtown New York I once knew so well, but now has disappeared.
Lizzie Borden is a filmmaker best known for her New York Feminisms Trilogy: Regrouping (1976), Born in Flames (1983), and Working Girls (1986). Her other feature films include Inside Out (1991), Love Crimes (1992), and Erotique (1994). She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and lives in Los Angeles.
