Nan Goldin is an American photographer who lives and works in New York and Paris. She is one of the most influential contemporary photographers. "I don’t choose people to photograph them," replied Goldin when asked why she often makes society’s marginalized and its extremes the subject of pictures, "These photos come from relationships, not from observation." Taken together, her photography is a visual diary of her life.
Background
Nan Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. in 1953 and grew up in the Boston suburb of Lexington to middle-class Jewish parents. Goldin’s father worked in broadcasting and served as the chief economist for the Federal Communications Commission.
Education
Goldin began to smoke marijuana and date an older man, and by age 13-14, she left home and enrolled at the Satya Community School in Lincoln. A Satya staff member (experimental philosopher Rollo May’s daughter) introduced Goldin to the camera in 1968 when she was fifteen years old. Still struggling from her sister's death, Goldin used the camera and photography to cherish her relationships with those she photographed. She also found the camera as a useful political tool, in order to inform the public about important issues silenced in America. Her early influences included Andy Warhol's early films, Federico Fellini, Jack Smith, French and Italian Vogue, Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton.
She began to take photographs and took a course at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston.
Career
Much influenced by cinéma verité and no doubt aware of the work of American photographer Larry Clark, Goldin took up photography about 1971. Her first published works (1973) were black-and-white images of transvestites and transsexuals. In 1974 she began to study art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she embarked on an enormous portrait of her life, making hundreds of colour transparencies of herself and her friends lying or sitting in bed, engaged in sexual play, recovering from physical violence against them, or injecting themselves with drugs. Her involvement in this hermetic world was revealed in a diaristic narrative sequence of often unfocused but strongly coloured transparencies arranged as a slide show entitled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981). Accompanied by a musical score that mixed rock, blues, opera, and reggae, the presentation was initially shown in nightclubs and eventually in galleries. Goldin continued to work on this project throughout the 1980s, and it was reproduced in 1986 in book form.
Continuing to photograph drag queens in the 1990s, she also created a series of images called - in reference to Edward Steichen’s humanistic and influential “Family of Man” exhibition of 1955 - The Family of Nan, 1990-1992, in which she documented her friends’ AIDS-related deaths. She photographed Japanese youths while traveling in Asia, and in 1995 she published those images in the book Tokyo Love: Spring Fever 1994. In 1995 she also made a biographical film for the BBC titled I’ll Be Your Mirror (with filmmaker Edmund Coulthard).
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries Goldin was the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (1996-1997) and at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2001). She was also the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2007 Hasselblad Award, an annual award granted by the Hasselblad Foundation to "a photographer recognized for major achievements."
Throughout her career Goldin was involved in various causes, including efforts to end the U.S. opioid epidemic. She received treatment for her addiction to the painkiller OxyContin in 2017 and later recounted her experience in the magazine Artforum. She called on the Sackler family, philanthropists who made part of their fortune from the sale of the drug, to take responsibility for their role in the crisis. Goldin also formed the advocacy group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.), which staged protests in such museums as the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Sackler Wing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to condemn the institutions’ use of funds from the family.
Views
Quotations:
"Maybe more than other photographers I don't believe in the single portrait. I believe only in the accumulation of portraits as a representation of a person," writes Goldin. "Because I think people are really complex."
"It's about letting it be what it is. And not trying to make it more or less, or altered. What I'm interested in is capturing life as it's being lived, and the flavor and the smell of it, and maintain that in the pictures.... It really is about this enormous acceptance. About wanting to see the truth and accepting it, rather than trying to make my version of it."