This Will Not End Well

Nan Goldin is one of the most eminent photographers of our times, and today lives and works between New York, Paris and Berlin. Given her first camera at the age of 15, she began taking Polaroids of herself and her friends at a hippie commune. In 1972 she moved in with a group of queens in Boston, starting her lifelong obsession with photographing queer and transgender communities. In 1978 Goldin moved to New York City, where she presented slideshows in nightclubs and underground cinemas; her best known, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” was published as a landmark book in 1986. In the nineties Goldin relocated to Berlin where she published A Double Life with David Armstrong and the first edition of The Other Side. In 2000 she moved to Paris, where she was invited to create site-specific works at the Louvre in 2010 and in Versailles in 2019. She divided her time between Paris and Berlin and in 2016 landed in New York. In 2018 Goldin and her colleagues founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a direct action group advocating for harm reduction and education to address the stigma of addiction and the mounting overdose crisis. The book has been an important medium for Goldin over the decades; her publications with Steidl include The Beautiful Smile (2008), Diving for Pearls (2016) and The Other Side (2019).