Nan Goldin

Nancy Goldin, born in 1953, is an American photographer and activist known for her snapshot-style exploration of individual emotions, intimate relationships, and the bohemian LGBT subcultural communities, particularly during the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Her most famous work, *The Ballad of Sexual Dependency*, is a slideshow and monograph from 1986 that documents her chosen family and the post-punk and gay subcultures. She co-founded the advocacy group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to combat the opioid epidemic. Goldin currently lives and works in New York City.

Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., to middle-class Jewish parents and grew up in the Boston suburb of Swampscott, later moving to Lexington as a teen. Her father worked in broadcasting and was the chief economist for the Federal Communications Commission. Goldin experienced tense family dynamics due to her parents’ frequent arguments about her older sister Barbara, who died by suicide when Goldin was 11. Goldin recalled that in 1965, teenage suicide was taboo; she was close to her sister and understood the role that repressed sexuality played in her destruction, noting that angry, sexual women were seen as frightening and beyond control in the early sixties. Barbara’s act of lying down on commuter train tracks outside Washington, D.C., was, Goldin said, “an act of immense will.”

At 13, Goldin left home, began smoking marijuana, and dated an older man, living in various foster homes. At 16, she enrolled at the Satya Community School in Lincoln, Massachusetts, which followed the Summerhill educational model. After Polaroid donated cameras, a staff member—the daughter of existential psychologist Rollo May—introduced Goldin to photography in 1969. She became the school photographer and grew “obsessed with recording my life,” using the camera to cherish her relationships, still struggling with her sister’s death. Initially, she emulated fashion photographers like Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton from stolen issues of French and Italian *Vogue*. Her teacher Henry Horenstein, whose class at the New England School of Photography she attended, showed her Larry Clark’s book *Tulsa* (1971), which shifted her focus from fashion to art photography. Through Horenstein, she also discovered August Sander and Lisette Model, attending a class by Model in 1974. She later enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with her friend David Armstrong, meeting Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe, and began photographing in color.

Goldin’s first solo show in Boston in 1973 featured her photographic journeys among the city’s gay and transgender communities, introduced to her by Armstrong. At 18, living in downtown Boston, she “fell in with the drag queens,” living with and photographing them. Her work from this period includes *Ivy wearing a fall, Boston* (1973). Unlike photographers who psychoanalyzed or exposed the queens, Goldin admired and respected their sexuality, stating, “My desire was to show them as a third gender, as another sexual option, a gender option. And to show them with a lot of respect and love, to kind of glorify them because I really admire people who can re-create themselves and manifest their fantasies publicly. I think it’s brave.” In a Q&A with *Bomb*, she admitted to being romantically in love with a queen during this time, recalling that at 19 she searched a psychology book for information, finding only a bizarre chapter in an abnormal psych text. Goldin described her life as completely immersed in the queens’ world: “I lived with them; it was my whole focus. Everything I did – that’s who I was all the time. And that’s who I wanted to be.” However, when professors at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts told her to photograph queens again, she felt her work was not the same as when she had lived with them. She graduated around 1977/1978, working mostly with Cibachrome prints and beginning to show slides. Her work from this period is linked to the Boston School of Photography.

After graduation, Goldin moved to New York City, documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene and the vibrant post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her first slideshow in New York was at Frank Zappa’s birthday party at the Mudd Club, with her boyfriend deejaying; another time, a live band (the Del Byzanteens featuring Jim Jarmusch) accompanied the screening. She gained wider exposure through the 1981 exhibition *New York/New Wave* at PS1.

In the Bowery neighborhood’s young, sex-affirmative, hard-drug subculture, Goldin found her “tribe,” which became the subject of her photographs from 1979 to 1986. These images formed her slideshow *The Ballad of Sexual Dependency*, initially shown to peers in clubs.