Nan Goldin
Self-portrait on my bed, NYC
Self-portrait on my bed, NYC, 1983
Cibachrome, 76.2 x 101.6 cm
Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur, gift Andreas Reinhart
1999-008-003
© Nan Goldin
b. 1953 (Washington, US), lives and works in New York, US
Nan Goldin’s photographs tell stories of the bonds between people, of friendship, love and sexuality, while also speaking of violence, grief and loss. Beginning in the 1970s, she regularly took pictures of friends and acquaintances, as well as self-portraits, capturing her subjects (herself included) in intimate and vulnerable moments, viewed with an empathic yet unsparing gaze. Her work often featured close associates like photographer David Armstrong and actress and writer Cookie Mueller, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989. Goldin would organise her photos – many of them accented by intense colours and harsh flash lighting – into narrative sequences, which she presented as slideshows with musical accompaniment. One such sequence formed the basis for her best-known work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which was published as a book in 1986. In her autobiographical documentation of private and intimate scenes, Goldin also tackles pressing contemporary themes with a social dimension, such as the realities faced by queer and gender-fluid people, the HIV epidemic of the 1980s and the opioid crisis of the 1990s. Goldin is bracketed together with artists like Mark Morrisroe and Philip-Lorca diCorcia as part of the informal Boston School of Photography.
