Goldin, Nan

▪ American photographer

born Sept. 12, 1953, Washington, D.C., U.S.

      American photographer noted for visual narratives detailing her own world of addictive and sexual activities.

      After leaving home at age 13, Goldin lived in foster homes and attended an alternative school in Lincoln, Mass. Suspicious of middle-class myths of romantic love between the sexes and mourning a sister who took her own life in 1964, Goldin sought a substitute family for her own blood relations. In doing so, she became part of a group of alienated young men and women involved with drugs, sex, and violence.

      Much influenced by cinéma verité (cinéma vérité) and no doubt aware of the work of American photographer Larry Clark (Clark, Larry), Goldin took up photography about 1971; her first published works (1973) were black-and-white images of transvestites and transsexuals. In 1974 she began to study art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she embarked on an enormous portrait of her life, making hundreds of colour transparencies of herself and her friends lying or sitting in bed, engaged in sexual play, recovering from physical violence against them, or injecting themselves with drugs. Her involvement in this hermetic world was revealed in a diaristic narrative sequence of often unfocused but strongly colored transparencies arranged as a slide show entitled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981). Accompanied by a musical score that mixed rock, blues, opera, and reggae, the presentation was initially shown in nightclubs and eventually in galleries. Goldin continued to work on this project throughout the 1980s, and it was reproduced in 1986 in book form.

      She said of her work:

My work originally came from the snapshot aesthetic…. Snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places, and shared times. They're about creating a history by recording a history.

      Continuing to photograph drag queens in the 1990s, she also created a series of images called—in reference to Edward Steichen's humanistic and influential “Family of Man” exhibition of 1955—The Family of Nan, 1990–92, in which she documented her friends' AIDS-related deaths. She photographed Japanese youths while traveling in Asia, and in 1995 she published these images in the book Tokyo Love: Spring Fever 1994. In 1996–97 the Whitney Museum of American Art presented a retrospective exhibition of her work.

* * *