Nan Goldin
b. 1953, United States
Nan Goldin was born in Washington, DC, in 1953. She lives and works in New York, Berlin, and Paris.
The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex.
—Nan Goldin
Emerging from the artist’s own life and relationships, and including herself as a subject, Nan Goldin’s work has transformed the role of photography in contemporary art. Her photographs and moving-image works address essential themes of identity, love, sexuality, addiction, and mortality. Uniting art and activism, Goldin has confronted the HIV/AIDS epidemic since the 1980s and today brings international attention to the overdose crisis.
Born in Washington, DC, in 1953, Goldin grew up outside of Boston. She left home at age fourteen, and at sixteen enrolled in the Satya Community School in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where she acquired her first camera. Goldin’s early black-and-white photographs, which convey the beauty, vulnerability, and joy of her friends in Boston’s transgender community, were initially shown in her first solo exhibition in 1973 at Project, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts. Attending Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts beginning in 1974, she would start working principally with Cibachrome prints and 35mm slides, taking photographs in saturated color.
Relocating to New York in 1978, Goldin began documenting members of her chosen family in a milieu of New Wave clubs, No Wave cinema, and post-Stonewall gay culture. Capturing moments of revelry and friendship, intimacy and loss, she titled this body of work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency after a song from The Threepenny Opera (1928) by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Constantly evolving, it grew into a multimedia presentation of almost seven hundred slides accompanied by an eclectic soundtrack. Initially projected in nightclubs, it was included in The Times Square Show in 1980, the Whitney Biennial in 1985, and countless other museum exhibitions around the world. It was published by Aperture in 1986 as the first of Goldin’s many books and was recently reprinted for the twenty-first time.
Goldin unflinchingly documents the struggles and courage that defined her community’s response to the devastating AIDS epidemic. In 1989, she organized Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at New York’s Artists Space, the first exhibition featuring the work of artists who were living with or had died from AIDS, or whose art responded to the disease, including David Armstrong, Peter Hujar, Greer Lankton, and David Wojnarowicz.
In recent years, Goldin has focused on natural light, the sky, and landscape in works that explore spirituality and mortality. Her portraits feature photographs of individuals and couples, children, and families taken over extended periods; other series picture empty rooms with palpable traces of human presence. Presented as projected images, large-scale grids of multiple prints, single prints, and books, Goldin’s photographs operate in narrative sequence with thematic relationships to one another.
I’ll Be Your Mirror, a mid-career retrospective of Goldin’s work, was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1996, and traveled throughout Europe. Collaborating with Edmund Coulthard, Goldin made the documentary film I’ll Be Your Mirror in 1996, offering an autobiographical exploration of her work and interviews with her close friends and subjects. The retrospective Le Feu Follet followed in 2001, opening at Centre Pompidou, Paris, and traveling extensively.
In 2010, the Musée du Louvre, Paris, commissioned Scopophilia, giving Goldin access to take pictures of its collection, which she paired with photographs from throughout her career to explore the fluidity of gender and constancy of desire. A major recent slideshow, Memory Lost (2019–21), scored by composer Mica Levi, with additional music by CJ Calderwood and Soundwalk Collective, relates a haunting and emotional narrative comprised of outtakes drawn from her archive of thousands of slides.
In 2017, Goldin founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in response to the overdose crisis. The group stages direct public actions to hold Big Pharma accountable and expose the complicity of institutions that accept such funding. These protests have led to the removal of the Sackler name from the British Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Musée du Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Serpentine Galleries, Tate, and other museums and universities. P.A.I.N. promotes life-saving treatments for people using drugs and advocates for a public policy of harm reduction.
This Will Not End Well, a retrospective focused on Goldin’s slideshows and video installations, was organized by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 2022 and will travel to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, before coming to the United States. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), a film directed by Laura Poitras on which Goldin collaborated, interweaves narratives of the artist’s life, work, and activism. It was awarded the Golden Lion at the 79th Venice International Film Festival and Best Documentary at the 38th Independent Spirit Awards and won film critics association awards for best documentary in New York, London, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the BAFTA Film Awards and the 95th Academy Awards.
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Her work is represented in major public and private collections worldwide. Retrospectives include I’ll Be Your Mirror, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1996–97, traveled to Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, 1997; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1997; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, 1997; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 1998; and Národní galerie Praha, Prague, 1998); and Le Feu Follet, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2001, traveled as Devil’s Playground to Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2002; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2002; Fundação Serralves, Porto, Portugal, 2002; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy, 2002–03; and Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, 2003). Goldin was appointed Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France (2006), and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Hasselblad Award (2007), Edward MacDowell Medal (2012), Centenary Medal from London’s Royal Photographic Society (2018), and Käthe Kollwitz Prize (2022).