Nan Goldin
Her photographs of friends, lovers and drag queens became a diary of queer life – and her protests brought down the Sackler name in museums.
Nan Goldin grew up in the suburbs of Washington and Boston. When she was eleven, her older sister took her own life; Goldin later said that photography became her way of holding on to people. As a teenager she left home and began photographing her friends, among them drag queens in Boston.
In New York in the late 1970s and 1980s she photographed her chosen family: friends, lovers, gay men, trans women, artists, people taking drugs, having sex, fighting and loving. Her slideshow and book “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1985) became one of the most influential works of photography. When many of her friends died of AIDS, she organised the exhibition “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” in 1989, which caused a political controversy.
Goldin has had relationships with both women and men. After surgery in 2014 she became addicted to the painkiller OxyContin. Having recovered, she founded the activist group P.A.I.N., which protested in museums against the Sackler family, whose company had marketed the drug. Many museums then removed the Sackler name from their walls.
The documentary about her, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” (2022), won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.