Nan Goldin, the pioneering photographer has been ranked as the contemporary art world’s most influential person.
Recently, Goldin called off a project for the New York Times Magazine because of the newspaper’s pro-Israel bias in its reporting on Gaza.
Goldin, 70, took the number one spot on the ArtReview Power 100 list. This year, for the first time, the top 10 is mde up entirely of artists who use their work and platforms to intervene in the pressing social and political issues of the current moment.
Goldin’s work has documented LGBTQ+ subcultures and the Aids crisis, and includes the seminal 80s photography collection The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, in which lovers and strangers meet, cavort, party and fight in the beaches, bars and cars of Provincetown, Boston, New York, Berlin and Mexico.
Her photography has often drawn directly on her life and her circle of friends. Nan Goldin says photography saved her life and she strives to pass this salvation on to others—through both her art and her activism. “Somebody told me recently that my work averted their suicide,” she wrote in 2021 for a new edition of her groundbreaking 1986 photo book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. “If I can help one person survive, that’s the ultimate purpose of my work.”
Nancy Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1953, the youngest of four children in a middle-class Jewish family. She adored her older sister, Barbara, but Barbara struggled, living in and out of mental institutions for years, and died by suicide at 18, lying down on railroad tracks in front of an oncoming train when Goldin was 11.
Earlier this year, Goldin was featured in a celebrated new documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, directed by Laura Poitras, that has since been nominated for an Academy Award. Read on to learn about Goldin’s life, work, and activism beyond the film.
