Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin is a renowned American photographer celebrated for her deeply personal and intimate portrayal of the human experience, particularly within marginalized communities. Emerging as a significant figure in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Goldin began her photographic journey at age fifteen and gained early recognition for her work with the transgender community and drag culture. Her most notable work, "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," showcases the lives of urban subcultures, including LGBTQ individuals, sex workers, and those affected by addiction, emphasizing the connections between love, sexuality, and personal struggle.
Goldin's style is characterized by spontaneity and authenticity rather than conventional composition, allowing her subjects' realities to shine through. Throughout her career, she has evolved, transitioning from dark themes in her photographs to more natural light and outdoor settings in later works, reflecting her experiences and losses. In addition to her artistic contributions, Goldin is an outspoken advocate against the opioid crisis, founding the organization Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN) to address the impact of addiction linked to pharmaceutical companies.
Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, marking her significance in the art world. Goldin continues to live and create in major cities such as New York, Paris, and Berlin, maintaining a presence as both an artist and educator.
Nan Goldin
Photographer
- Born: September 12, 1953
- Place of Birth: Washington, DC
PHOTOGRAPHER
Goldin gained fame by photographing people’s lives at an intensely personal level, and her gripping images made her one of the foremost photographers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
AREA OF ACHIEVEMENT: Art
Early Life
Nancy "Nan" Goldin is one of four children of Hyman and Lillian Goldin. She has two brothers; her sister died young. After spending part of her childhood in Washington, DC, Nan Goldin began to take photographs at the age of fifteen while attending Satya Community School in Lincoln, Massachusetts. In 1972, Goldin became transfixed by a pair of transgender people she saw in downtown Boston. She made a movie of them, and that began her long obsession with the transgender community. Her first exhibition, in 1972, featured black-and-white photographs of drag queens. She fell in love with a drag queen and moved into a Boston apartment with two transgender women for the next two years. Part of Goldin’s expression of friendship involved photography. She wanted to show her friends how beautiful they were through film. She never viewed them as men dressing as women but rather as a third gender that made more sense than either of the other two. She admired their courage. Meanwhile, Goldin supported herself by working in Beacon Hill pharmacy.
Taking a photography class at night, she aimed to become a fashion photographer who would put drag queens on the cover of Vogue. Goldin completed a course of study at ImageWorks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1974; then she began to attend art school full time. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1977 and returned to earn a Fifth Year Certificate in 1978.
Life’s Work
Goldin briefly journeyed to London after graduation. She lived in squatter apartments and mixed with skinheads. Returning to the United States, she lived in the Bowery on the lower East Side of New York City in the late 1970s and 1980s. As she built her reputation as a photographer, Goldin worked as a bartender in Times Square, at a time when the area had a reputation for being seedy. Goldin’s reliance on spontaneity and her focus on the human condition place her among the ranks of the neoexpressionists. In Goldin’s images, content is more important than a perfect composition. Her early black-and-white photographs, from the beginning of the 1970s, reflected her dream of becoming a fashion photographer. By the end of the decade, Goldin had begun to focus on her own life, and this became the hallmark of her work. Her photographs of the 1980s and the early 1990s typically show representatives of urban subculture, such as LGBTQ people, sex workers, and drug addicts.
Goldin initially exhibited her photographs in the form of slide shows in her apartment or in clubs such as the Mudd Club and Tin Pan Alley. In 1985, Goldin’s work was included in the Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York. Her friends became the topic of her best-known work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). Goldin is famous for her explicit portrayal of the erotic, but her work has not been sensationalist. One of the more outspoken women artists on sexuality, Goldin sees sex as a mirror for the soul and a link to the pains and joys of love and friendship.
Meanwhile, Goldin struggled with drug abuse and went into drug rehabilitation in 1988. With her health restored, she won the Camera Austria Prize for contemporary photography in 1989. The next year, Goldin received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mother Jones Documentary Photography Award. Moving to Berlin in 1991 as part of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Artists-in-Residence program, Goldin published Cookie Mueller (1991), photographs documenting her close friendship with an actor who succumbed to AIDS. In 1995, she made the documentary I’ll Be Your Mirror for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In the 1990s, after the deaths of many of her friends and early subjects, Goldin began to allow natural light to appear in her pictures, and she started photographing outdoors. Her pictures became less dark, in subject as well as in form.
By the opening of the twenty-first century, Goldin had become a legendary figure in photography. France made her a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2006. She won the prestigious 2007 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for outstanding artistic achievement. Goldin served as curator for the fortieth Rencontres d'Arles festival in 2009.
In later years, Goldin turned to photographing landscapes and children, especially those of her siblings and close friends. Eden and After (2014) met with a great deal of controversy due to the inclusion of photographs of nude children, and some of Goldin's shows have been censored over fears that the content was pornographic. Goldin has stated that her intention with those works is to convey the wisdom, autonomy, and flexibility of young children.
Goldin lives and works in New York City, Paris, and Berlin. She keeps numerous speaking engagements and teaches in addition to producing her art. Her images are in major galleries. For example, "Nan One Month After Being Battered" is in the collection of the Tate Galleries, London.
Significance
Goldin celebrates those who live in marginal subcultures through her realistic photographs. She is considered a pioneer of the confessional style of photography. The theme of the outsider is central to her work, and she documents those who make an everyday life into an extraordinary life. By photographing the private moments of friends, she blurs the division between public and private. Everything is performed for the camera and, therefore, for the public. Her work fits an era in which little is kept private.
The photographer founded Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN) in 2017. This organization focused on Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, and the impact of opioid addiction and fatalities in the United States. PAIN targeted museums that had accepted donations from the Sacklers for demonstrations. Goldin's activism on this subject is the subject of Laura Poitras's 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.
Bibliography
Beyfus, Drusilla. "Nan Goldin: Unafraid of the Dark." Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 26 June 2009. Web. 25 Mar. 2016.
Dargis, Manohla. "'All the Beauty and the Bloodshed' Review: Nan Goldin's Art and Activism." The New York Times, 20 June 2023, www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/movies/all-the-beauty-and-the-bloodshed-review-nan-goldin.html. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.
Fan, Qiao. "Authenticity, Lawlessness and the Lack of Aesthetics in Nan Goldin and Larry Clark's Photography." Arts Studies and Criticism, vol. 2, no. 3, 2021, pp. 100-102, doi.org/10.32629/asc.v2i3.440. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.
Goldin, Nan. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1986.
Goldin, Nan. Cookie Mueller. New York: Pace/MacGill Gallery, 1991.
Goldin, Nan. The Other Side. New York: Scalo, 2000.
Goldin, Nan, and Elisabeth Sussman. I’ll Be Your Mirror. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996.
O'Hagan, Sean. "Nan Goldin: 'I Wanted to Get High from a Really Early Age.'" Observer. Guardian News and Media, 22 Mar. 2014.
Peiffer, Prudence. "Nan Goldin. American, Born 1953." Museum of Modern Art, 2024, www.moma.org/artists/7532. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.
Ritchey, Jack, et al., eds. Nan Goldin: The Beautiful Smile. Gottingen, Germany: Steidl, 2007.
Weinberg, Jonathan, and Joyce Henri Robinson. Fantastic Tales: The Photography of Nan Goldin. University Park: Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, 2005.
Zuromskis, Catherine. Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images. MIT P, 2021.