Life and work

Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., 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. After attending the nearby Lexington High School, Goldin left home at 13-14. She enrolled at the Setya Community School in Lincoln, where a teacher, Philosopher Rollo May’s daughter introduced her to the camera in 1968. Goldin was then fifteen years old. Her early influences were Andy Warhol's early films, Federico Fellini, Jack Smith, French and Italian Vogue, Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton.

Her first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was based on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transsexual communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong. While living in downtown Boston at age 18, Goldin “fell in with the drag queens,” living with them and photographing them. Unlike some photographers who were interested in psychoanalyzing or exposing the queens, Goldin admired and respected their sexuality. Goldin said, “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 recreate themselves and manifest their fantasies publicly. I think it’s brave”. Goldin admitted to being romantically in love with a queen during this period of her life in a Q&A with “BOMB,” “I remember going through a psychology book trying to find something about it when I was nineteen. There was one little chapter about it in an abnormal psych book that made it sound so… I don’t know what they ascribed it to, but it was so bizarre. And that’s where I was at that time in my life. 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”. Goldin describes her life as being completely immersed in the queens’. However, after she went to the school of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, her professors told her to go back and photograph queens again, Goldin admitted her work was not the same as when she had lived with them. Goldin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in 1977/1978, where she had worked mostly with Cibachrome prints. Her work from this period is associated with the Boston School of photography.

Following graduation, Goldin moved to New York City. She began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the hard-drug subculture of the Bowery neighborhood; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Published with help from Marvin Heiferman, Mark Holborn, and Suzanne Fletcher, these snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. In her foreword to the book she describes it as a “diary lets people read” of people she referred to as her “tribe”. The photographs show a transition through Goldin’s travels and her life. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug overdose or AIDS; this tally included close friends and often-photographed subjects Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. In 2003, The New York Times nodded to the work's impact, explaining Goldin had "forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last twenty years." In addition to Ballad, she combined her Bowery pictures in two other series: I'll Be Your Mirror (from a song on The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico album) and All By Myself.

Goldin's work is most often presented in the form of a slideshow, and has been shown at film festivals; her most famous being a 45-minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually shot with available light. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. The images are viewed like a private journal made public. In the book Auto-Focus, her photographs are described as a way to “learn the stories and intimate details of those closest to her”. It speaks of her uncompromising manner and style when photographing acts such as drug use, sex, violence, arguments, and traveling. It references one of Goldin’s famous photographs 'Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984' as an iconic image which she uses to reclaim her identity and her life.

Goldin's work since 1995 has included a wide array of subject matter: collaborative book projects with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki; New York City skylines; uncanny landscapes (notably of people in water); her lover, Siobhan; and babies, parenthood and family life.

In 2002, her hand was injured in a fall, and she currently retains less ability to turn it than in the past.

In 2006, her exhibition, Chasing a Ghost, opened in New York. It was the first installation by her to include moving pictures, a fully narrative score, and voiceover, and included the three-screen slide and video presentation Sisters, Saints, & Sybils which has been described as disturbing. The work involved her sister Barbara's suicide and how she coped through production of numerous images and narratives. Her works are developing more and more into cinemaesque features, exemplifying her gravitation towards working with films.

Goldin has undertaken commercial fashion photography - for Australian label Scanlan & Theodore's spring/summer 2010 campaign, shot with model Erin Wasson; for Italian luxury label Bottega Veneta's spring/summer 2010 campaign with models Sean O'Pry and Anya Kazakova, evoking memories of her Ballad of Sexual Dependency; for shoemaker Jimmy Choo in 2011 with model Linda Vojtova; and for Dior in 2013, 1000 LIVES, featuring Robert Pattinson.

Criticism

Some critics have accused her of making heroin-use appear glamorous, and of pioneering a grunge style that later became popularized by youth fashion magazines such as The Face and I-D. However, in a 2002 interview with The Observer, Goldin herself called the use of "heroin chic" to sell clothes and perfumes "reprehensible and evil." Goldin admits to having a romanticized image of drug culture at a young age, but she soon saw the error in this ideal, “I had a totally romantic notion of being a junkie. I wanted to be one.” Goldin’s substance usage stopped after she became intrigued with the idea of memory in her work, “When people talk about the immediacy in my work, that’s what its about: this need to remember and record every single thing”

Censorship

An exhibition of Goldin's work was censored in Brazil, two months before opening, due to its sexually explicit nature. The main reason was the photographs containing sexual acts next to children. In Brazil, there is a law that prohibits the image of minors associated with pornography. The sponsor of the exhibition, a cellphone company, claimed to be unaware of the content of Goldin's work and that there was a conflict between the work and its educational project. The curator of the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art changed the schedule in order to accommodate, in February 2012, the Goldin exhibition in Brazil.

Publications

Books by Goldin

• The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. New York: Aperture, 1986. ISBN 978-0-89381-236-2.
• Cookie Mueller (exhibition catalogue). New York: Pace/MacGill Gallery, 1991.
• The Other Side. Perseus Distribution Services, 1993. ISBN 1-881616-03-7.
• Vakat. Cologne: Walter Konig, 1993.
• Desire by Numbers. San Francisco: Artspace, 1994.
• A double life. Zurich: Scalo, 1994.
• Tokyo Love. Tokyo: Hon don do, 1994.
• The Golden Years (exhibition catalogue). Paris: Yvon Lambert, 1995.
• I'll Be Your Mirror (exhibition catalogue). Zurich: Scalo, 1996. ISBN 978-3-931141-33-2.
• Love Streams (exhibition catalogue). Paris: Yvon Lambert, 1997.
• Emotions and Relations (exhibition catalogue). Cologne: Taschen, 1998.
• Ten Years After: Naples 1986-1996. Zurich: Scalo, 1998. ISBN 978-3-931141-79-0.
• Couples and Loneliness. Tokyo: Korinsha, 1998.
• Nan Goldin: Recent Photographs. Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1999.
• Nan Goldin. 55, London: Phaidon, 2001. ISBN 978-0-7148-4073-4.
• Devils Playground. London: Phaidon, 2003. ISBN 978-0-7148-4223-3.
• Soeurs, Saintes et Sibylles. Editions du Regard, 2005. ISBN 978-2-84105-179-3.
• The Beautiful Smile. Göttingen: Steidl, 2007. ISBN 978-3-86521-539-0.
• Variety: Photographs by Nan Goldin. Skira Rizzoli, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8478-3255-2.
• Eden and After. London: Phaidon, 2014. ISBN 978-0714865775.

Books with contributions by Goldin

• Emotions & Relations. Foto Series. Taschen, 1998. With David Armstrong, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. ISBN 978-3822875070.
• So the Story Goes: Photographs by Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Larry Sultan. Yale University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0300114119.
• Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Photography. By Susan Bright. London: Thames & Hudson, 2010. ISBN 978-0500543894. Includes three contributions by Goldin.

Recognition

Awards

• 2006: French Legion of Honor.
• 2007: Hasselblad Award.
• 2012: 53rd Edward MacDowell Medal, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH.

Portrayal in film

The photographs by the character Lucy Berliner, played by actress Ally Sheedy in the 1998 film High Art, were based on those by Goldin.

The photographs shown in the film, "Working Girls," (directed by Lizzie Borden, 1986) as taken by the lead character "Molly," were actually those of Nan Goldin.

Selected solo exhibitions

• 1987: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, screening. Rencontres d'Arles.
• 1987: "Nan Goldin", exhibition. Rencontres d'Arles.
• 1996: “I’ll be Your Mirror,” retrospectives, Whitney Museum of American Art, and traveled to Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (de), Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Kunsthalle Wien; and National Museum, Prague.
• 1997: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, exhibition and screening, Théâtre Antique. Rencontres d'Arles.
• 2001: “Le Feu Follet,” Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and traveled to Whitechapel Gallery, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and Ujazdów Castle, Warsaw.
• 2009: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, exhibition and screening, Guest of honour at Rencontres d'Arles

Exhibitions curated

• 1991: "From Desire: A Queer Diary," Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University

[ Source: Wikipedia ]