Nan Goldin

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

Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1953 to middle-class Jewish parents. She grew up in the Boston suburb of Swampscott and moved to Lexington as a teenager. Her father worked in broadcasting and was chief economist for the Federal Communications Commission. Her parents often argued about her older sister Barbara, who committed suicide when Goldin was 11. Goldin later said that teenage suicide was taboo in 1965, that she was close to her sister and understood some of the forces leading to her death, including the repression of Barbara’s sexuality. She described her sister’s suicide as an act of immense will, lying down on commuter train tracks outside Washington, D.C.

Goldin began smoking marijuana and dating an older man. She left home at 13 and lived in foster homes. At 16, she enrolled at the Satya Community School in Lincoln, Massachusetts, which followed the Summerhill educational concept. After Polaroid donated cameras to the school, a staff member—the daughter of existential psychologist Rollo May—introduced Goldin to photography in 1969. She became the school photographer and became obsessed with recording her life. Still affected by her sister’s death, she used the camera to cherish relationships with those she photographed. Initially, she emulated fashion photography by Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton from stolen issues of French and Italian *Vogue*. Henry Horenstein, whose evening class she attended at the New England School of Photography, appreciated her work and showed her Larry Clark’s book *Tulsa* (1971), which documented Clark’s life among speedfreaks. This 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, where she met Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe and began photographing in color.

Goldin’s first solo show, in Boston in 1973, was based on 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 drag queens, living with them and photographing them. One work from this period is *Ivy wearing a fall, Boston* (1973). Unlike photographers who sought to psychoanalyze or expose the queens, Goldin admired and respected their sexuality. She said her desire was to show them as a third gender, a sexual and gender option, and to glorify them with respect and love, because she admired people who re-create themselves and manifest their fantasies publicly. She admitted being romantically in love with a queen during this period, recalling that a psychology book she consulted at 19 had a small chapter on the subject in an abnormal psychology text that made it seem bizarre. She described her life as completely immersed in that of the queens, saying it was her whole focus and who she 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 lived with them. She graduated around 1977/1978, having worked mostly with Cibachrome prints and also begun showing slides. Her work from this period is associated with the Boston School of Photography.

After graduation, Goldin moved to New York City. She documented the post-punk new-wave music scene and the city’s vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her first New York slideshow was at Frank Zappa’s birthday party at the Mudd Club, with her boyfriend as deejay; 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 young, sex-affirmative, hard-drug subculture of the Bowery neighborhood, Goldin found her tribe, which became the subject of photographs taken between 1979 and 1986. These pictures form her slideshow *The Ballad of Sexual Dependency*.