Nan Goldin

Barbara’s Death: Resisting the Revision of Memory

Goldin’s point of departure was the memory of her sister Barbara, who died by suicide in 1965. As she watched her sister’s life and death recast within the family into a more acceptable account, Goldin began using photography to preserve the details of people and places^*23. In the introduction to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, she describes photography as a way to preserve her world^*2. She later said that the work grew less from a plan to become an artist than from a “need to record everything”^*23.

Family albums often select birthdays, trips, weddings, and other events a family wants to remember. Goldin also photographed sex, arguments, drug use, injury, and illness as parts of the same life. She chose to preserve shared time with all its contradictions instead of constructing a portrait from happy occasions alone.

Photography as a “Mirror”: The Relationship Comes First

In her mid-teens, Goldin was given a Polaroid at an alternative school; the first person she photographed was her close friend David Armstrong. She has explained that the relationship usually came first and that the photograph became a “mirror” that could show people a beauty they did not recognize in themselves^*1. She continued photographing the same people for twenty or thirty years, so that changes in those relationships unfolded across the work itself.

In the early 1970s, she frequented the Boston drag bar The Other Side and photographed while living among her friends who performed in drag. Goldin has described the work as a tribute to their beauty^*9. Her loose circle at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—including David Armstrong, Mark Morrisroe, and Jack Pierson—later became known as the Boston School. The ICA Boston describes these artists as focusing on the queer underground in and around Boston from the late 1970s through the 1980s and using photography to preserve a record during the AIDS crisis^*29.

New Documents and Tulsa: Taking Subjective Documentary Further

Before Goldin, documentary photography was already moving away from the idea of social reform and toward openly personal ways of seeing. MoMA’s 1967 exhibition New Documents presented Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand as a generation less concerned with reforming society through photographs than with understanding the world they inhabited^*30. Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1971) made the lives and deaths of his friends into a black-and-white photobook from the position of someone who was both participant in and observer of the drug culture^*28.

Goldin encountered Clark’s and Arbus’s photographs around age nineteen, finding precedents for photographing from inside a community^*3. She expanded this approach through color, music, long-term recurrence, and a projected sequence that included self-portraits. Women, men, drag queens, and Goldin herself appear in the same work, including her own face after an assault. Clark followed his friends through the fixed order of a book; Goldin built a live projection in which the same people returned across years.

New Color and the Family Slide Show: Using Color as Information for Memory

In the 1970s, William Eggleston photographed familiar places in the American South in color; MoMA presented the work in a 1976 solo exhibition and the book William Eggleston’s Guide^*21. Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces similarly recorded meals, motels, roads, and people as a color diary during a 1972–73 journey^*22. In Goldin’s work, color does more than organize a single frame. Skin, lipstick, bar lighting, wallpaper, and sheets become cues to whose room she was in, with whom, and when. Color helps connect appearances of the same person across different days.

Her compact 35mm camera could move easily through bars, clubs, and bedrooms, while direct flash recorded people and the surrounding objects in dark interiors. Goldin has said that she framed furniture and possessions along with the people so she could remember the environments in which they lived^*3. She projected sex, violence, drug use, and illness in the same format used for family slides of vacations and birthdays. The audience therefore encountered the work at the intimate distance of being shown an acquaintance’s album.

Warhol, Jack Smith, and Vivienne Dick: Giving Photographs the Time of Film

Underground film was as important as photography to Goldin’s early visual education. She has named the films of Andy Warhol and Jack Smith as major influences from before she studied photography, and thought of the recurring cast she photographed for decades—David, Cookie, Sharon, and others—in terms of Warhol’s “superstars”^*1. As film characters change from scene to scene, her friends do not end with a single portrait; they return years later.

The slide projections began because her art school had no darkroom and she showed color slides in place of prints^*23. Her interest in film and music helped turn that practical accident into a sustained form. Goldin has said that Vivienne Dick’s films taught her how to start and stop music and move into another scene^*23. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a sequence of color snapshots and, at the same time, a film of still images combining photography, popular music, and live performance in clubs.

One Picture Cannot Preserve a Person: Repetition, Music, and Live Editing

Goldin did not believe that one photograph could encompass an entire person, and she has worked with multiple images, grids, and triptychs^*23. In The Ballad, Nan and Brian, Cookie and Vittorio, and others reappear through embraces, arguments, sleep, care, illness, and death. A person who might be read in one image as “the happy lover,” “the violent man,” or “the AIDS patient” returns in different roles and expressions, making it difficult to treat any single photograph as the final account of that life.

The early projections took place in bars, parties, and underground cinemas. Goldin manually advanced hundreds of slides and revised the sequence during the performance^*7. Friends depicted in the work sat in the audience, and she removed photographs when they objected. Subjects also retained editorial input in private screenings during the 1990s^*23. Princeton University Art Museum describes the current version as a forty-two-minute work of approximately 700 images^*5. The shape of memory depended on more than taking photographs: Goldin chose which person would return and which songs would surround each appearance.

Why Private Life Was Read Politically: Gender, Violence, and Editorial Control

While Goldin worked at the Times Square bar Tin Pan Alley, co-owner Maggie Smith read The Ballad as a political work about gender, sex work, and male violence. Goldin has said that Smith’s observation enabled her to understand her work politically^*23. When love, domestic violence, queer life, and dependency recur within the same relationships, gendered disparities of power and violence left unspoken by others appear as specific events.

MoMA’s program on The Ballad asks viewers to consider photography, memory, and the diary as “critical documentary”^*27. The museum’s account emphasizes that the photographs grew from ongoing relationships rather than external observation^*12. The photographer appears as a lover, friend, and survivor of violence, making her position visible. Goldin nevertheless retained authority over shooting, selection, and projection. The work records violence within intimate life while raising questions about who selects, owns, and circulates the images. Liz Kotz has argued that insider status does not in itself eliminate voyeurism or disparities of power^*20.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency: Live Projection, Photobook, Museum

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency developed from live projections in bars and underground cinemas in the late 1970s^*7. After its presentation in the 1985 Whitney Biennial, Aperture published the photobook in 1986, fixing 127 images selected from the projected version into a page sequence^*8. Marvin Heiferman, who worked on the edit, has described how a presentation that changed each time became a single edition in book form^*6.

MoMA exhibited the work as manually advanced 35mm slides with music, tracing its development from live performance^*4. The recent retrospective This Will Not End Well was organized around six slideshows and reconsidered Goldin’s work as a combination of still images, sound, and duration^*17. Live projection, photobook, and museum installation establish different relationships to the audience. They also show how a work whose subjects could once intervene from the seats became an artwork preserved and shown repeatedly.

Nan One Month After Being Battered: A Self-Portrait Against Forgetting

Nan One Month After Being Battered (1984) is a self-portrait made one month after Goldin was assaulted by her partner Brian^*11. A swollen eye, wounds, carefully arranged hair, and red lipstick occupy the same frame; victim, photographer, and the person deciding to preserve the image are one and the same. MoMA places the self-portrait at the end of her relationship with Brian^*12. The photograph keeps love and violence within the history of the same relationship, leaving their consequences on Goldin’s face instead of dividing them into separate narratives.

AIDS and Witnesses: Preserving Names as a Community Disappeared

By the late 1980s, many of the friends Goldin had photographed had died of AIDS. Images of Cookie and Vittorio move from marriage to illness and death, turning a record of romance into a record of care and loss^*5. Goldin has said that during current projections she sits at the back, counts how many people have died, and speaks to them through the slides^*23. The purpose of the work shifted: from recording the desires and relationships of a living community to maintaining contact with the dead and preserving the lives they had led before they could be collapsed into anonymous “victims.”

In 1989, Goldin organized Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space, gathering art and writing by friends affected by AIDS^*13. She has explained that the exhibition began when she tried to return to her community and found that many friends were already dead or dying^*14. The NEA’s withdrawal of funding over an essay by David Wojnarowicz made the government’s response to AIDS, religious conservatism, and arts censorship matters of public dispute^*15.

Sisters, Saints, Sibyls: Reexamining Her Sister’s Death Through Documents

The three-channel video Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–22) brings together the legend of Saint Barbara, the life and death of Goldin’s sister Barbara, and Goldin’s own hospitalization^*18. Using family photographs, psychiatric reports, images of the psychiatric ward, voices, and moving images, the work examines how her family and psychiatric institutions treated her sister^*19. Religion, family, medicine, and autobiography appear simultaneously across three screens, with no single account treated as definitive. The method that repeated her friends’ lives in The Ballad returns here as a way of comparing documents left about her sister and questioning the memory constructed by the family.

What Passed to Tillmans, Billingham, and Fashion Photography

“Intimate Life” provides a way to compare contemporary photography of family, lovers, and friends in which the photographer also appears as a participant in the life being recorded. ICP places Goldin, Emmet Gowin, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, and others in a lineage extending from the family album, diary, and self-portrait^*25. MEP’s Love Songs likewise built a multigenerational history of photographs of lovers around Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki^*26.

Wolfgang Tillmans expanded from photographs of friends and club culture into abstraction and social activism, constructing installations that included slide projection^*10. Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh organized photographs of his family home, marked by alcoholism and poverty, into a color photobook^*16. In 1990s fashion photography, direct flash, disordered interiors, and unguarded bodies were used to suggest everyday life in place of the idealized model^*24. Subsequent artists inherited more than the look of direct flash or snapshot informality. They also inherited questions about whom one photographs over time, how multiple images are sequenced, and how images made within close relationships should be handled after they enter public circulation.

Photography, Projection, Publication, Recirculation: Four Stages of Consent

At early projections, friends depicted in the work asked for photographs to be removed, and Goldin complied^*23. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency later became a photobook, a museum work, and a set of reproduced images that continues to circulate decades after the photographs were made. Permission to take a photograph, agreement to show it among friends, consent to publication in a book, and posthumous display in museums and markets each have a different scope.

Kotz argued that belonging to the same community does not erase differences in authority over editing, exhibition, and sale, while viewers can observe intimate lives from a protected distance^*20. The difference between early projections, where subjects could ask for an image to be removed, and museum displays that repeat a fixed sequence reveals both the strength and the limit of Goldin’s method. Because personal relationships provided the basis for the photographs, the question remains: who decides what may be shown after those relationships change?

From Witnesses to P.A.I.N.: Connecting Memory to Institutional Responsibility

Founded in 2017, P.A.I.N. grew out of Goldin’s own opioid dependency and targeted both the Sackler family’s pharmaceutical profits and the museums that accepted their donations^*23. Goldin has cited ACT UP as an organizational model and described choosing museum lobbies and galleries as sites of protest^*14.

P.A.I.N., like her earlier work, asked who controls the account of personal experience and who bears responsibility. With her sister’s death, Goldin opposed the explanation constructed by the family. In The Ballad, she preserved the contradictory lives of lovers and friends. Witnesses documented a community disappearing through AIDS and the censorship surrounding it. P.A.I.N. redirected attention from narratives that treated addiction as individual failure to pharmaceutical marketing, museum donations, and social shame. Across Goldin’s work and activism is a consistent effort to preserve the people she loves and expose the power of families, governments, corporations, and art institutions to determine what their memories mean.

Goldin’s place in photographic history lies in bringing together the subjective documentary that emerged after the 1960s, 1970s color photography, Larry Clark’s insider documentary, the family album, and the editing of underground film in one projection set to music. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency developed a form that refuses to explain a person through a single image and repeatedly revisits shared time. It also left later artists and museums with a question: who may select images of intimate subjects, and for how long may those images remain public?