31 Facts About Nan Goldin

Nancy Goldin was born on 1953 and is an American photographer and activist.

Nan Goldin was born in Washington, DC, in 1953 to middle-class Jewish parents, and grew up in the Boston suburb of Swampscott, moving to Lexington in her teens.

Nan Goldin's father worked in broadcasting and served as the chief economist for the Federal Communications Commission.

Nan Goldin began to smoke marijuana and date an older man.

Nan Goldin left home by age 13 and subsequently lived in various foster homes.

Nan Goldin got to be the school photographer and became "obsessed with recording my life".

Still struggling from her sister's death, Nan Goldin used the camera to cherish her relationships with those she photographed.

Henry Horenstein, whose evening class at New England School of Photography Nan Goldin attended, appreciated her pictures and showed her Larry Clark's book Tulsa that had just come out in 1971 and documented Clark's life within a group of "speedfreaks".

Nan Goldin finally enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with her friend from Satya, David Armstrong.

Nan Goldin describes her life as having been completely immersed in that of the queens.

However, upon attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, when her professors told her to go back and photograph queens again, Nan Goldin admitted her work was not the same as when she had lived with them.

Nan Goldin began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Nan Goldin's works are developing more and more into cinemaesque features, exemplifying her gravitation towards working with films.

Some critics have accused Nan Goldin of making heroin use appear glamorous and of pioneering a grunge style that later became popularized by youth fashion magazines such as The Face and I-D.

Nan Goldin's insistence on intimacy between artist and subject is an attempt to relegitimize the codes and conventions of social documentary, presumably by ridding them of their problematic enmeshment with the histories of social surveillance and coercion, says Kotz.

One of the reasons Nan Goldin began photographing was Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up.

Nan Goldin turned the camera on himself and his lowlife amphetamine-shooting board of hanger-ons.

In 2017, in a speech in Brazil, Nan Goldin revealed she was recovering from opioid addiction, specifically to OxyContin, after being prescribed the drug after wrist surgery.

Nan Goldin had sought treatment for her addiction and battled through rehab.

Nan Goldin has said the campaign attempts to contrast the philanthropic contributions of the Sackler family to art galleries, museums and universities with a lack of responsibility taken for the opioid crisis.

In February 2019, Nan Goldin staged a protest at the Guggenheim Museum in New York over its acceptance of funding by the Sackler family.

Nan Goldin says she spent some of the money on buying black market OxyContin, as doctors would no longer prescribe her the drug.

In October 2023, soon after the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Nan Goldin signed a letter on Artforum that was criticized by pro-Israel activists for being antisemitic, as it did not mention the Palestinian organization Hamas or the Israelis who were killed.

Nan Goldin was arrested on October 14,2024 during a Jewish Voice for Peace protest in New York City.

In 2023, Nan Goldin was described as the most influential person in the art world in ArtReview's "Power 100" list of influential people in art.

The sponsor of the exhibition, a cellphone company, claimed to be unaware of the content of Nan Goldin's work and that there was a conflict between the work and its educational project.

Additionally, Wojnarowicz speaks about the efficacy of making the private public via the model of outing, as he and Nan Goldin believed empowerment begins through self-disclosure.

Nan Goldin's show was met with criticism, but in particular Wojnarowicz's explicit essay, Nan Goldin as curator stood by, lead to the National Endowment for the Arts rescinding its support for the publication.

Nan Goldin accompanied the production of the film with her camera; the photographs were published in 2009.

Nan Goldin provided still photography for two films by Sara Driver: You Are Not I, starring Nan Goldin's lover and friend Suzanne Fletcher, and herself playing one of the accident victims.

The intimate hour-long portrait Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face directed by Sabine Lidl came out in 2011.