Nan Goldin

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Lore & Background

Goldin's first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was based on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transgender 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. 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 re-create themselves and manifest their fantasies publicly. I think it's brave.' She graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1977/1978. 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. Her first slideshow in New York was at the birthday party of Frank Zappa at the Mudd Club. A first exposure to a wider audience was her participation in the 1981 exhibition New York/New Wave at PS1.

Reader's Guide

Nan Goldin's most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a slideshow and monograph (1986) that documents her chosen family and the post-punk and gay subcultures. The photographs were taken between 1979 and 1986. Later versions of the cycle had around 700 images screened in about 45 minutes (ca. 3 seconds per slide). After the slideshow was screened at the Whitney Biennial in 1985, it was published as a book a year later by Aperture. The snapshot aesthetic images were dominantly taken indoors and by night: 'That series is stark. It's all flash-lit. I honestly didn't know about natural light then and how it affected the colour of the skin because I never went out in daylight.' They depict autobiographical moments, mostly of friends, women and men for themselves and couples, often nude, some casual, some explicit. Her self-portrait, 'Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984', was called the center-piece of the Ballad. In her foreword to the book she describes it as a 'diary [she] lets people read' of people she referred to as her 'tribe'. 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 1989, six days after Mueller's death, Goldin's show 'Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing' opened in New York, a multi-artist show at Artists Space dealing frankly with issues related to living and dying with HIV/AIDS.

Did You Know?

• Goldin began photographing at age 16 after Polaroid donated cameras to her school, and a staff member (existential psychologist Rollo May's daughter) introduced her to photography in 1969.
• Her first solo show in Boston in 1973 was based on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transgender communities, introduced by her friend David Armstrong.
• The title The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera.
• Goldin's self-portrait 'Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984' was called the center-piece of the Ballad.
• In 1989, six days after Cookie Mueller's death, Goldin's show 'Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing' opened at Artists Space, dealing frankly with HIV/AIDS.