Nan Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in the DC area suburbs in Maryland, but ran away from home and was fostered by a variety of families. Nan Goldin later schooling was at the Satya Community School in Boston, where a teacher introduced her to the camera in 1968, when Nan Goldin was fifteen.
Nan Goldin first solo show was in Boston in 1973, based on her photography among the city’s gay and transvestite communities, to which Nan Goldin had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong. It was he who renamed her “Nan”. Nan Goldin graduated from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in 1978.
Nan Goldin moved to New York City and began documentary photography of the punk newwave music scene, and the city’s vibrant gay subculture in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Nan Goldin gradually being drawn in to the Bowery’s hard drug subculture. These photographs, taken from 1979 to 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s due to either drug overdoses or AIDS, including her close friend and often photographed subject, Cookie Mueller. In addition to the Ballad Nan Goldin combined her pictures in two other series I’ll Be Your Mirror and All by Myself.
Look art is very subjective but Nan Goldin’s work make the use of drugs as the in thing, so in my mind it is sick, but again who makes me an art critic, Nan Goldin at the end of the day is the person that decides what she feels she needs to showcase.
