NAN GOLDIN is an American photographer and activist born on this date. Her work often explores LGBT subcultures, moments of intimacy, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). The monograph documents the post-Stonewall, gay subculture and includes Goldin’s family and friends. She is a founding member of the advocacy group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). She lives and works in New York City.

Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. in 1953 to middle-class Jewish parents, and grew up in the Boston suburb of Swampscott, moving to Lexington in her teens. Goldin’s father worked in broadcasting and served as the chief economist for the Federal Communications Commission. Goldin had early exposure to tense family relationships, sexuality, and suicide, as her parents often argued about Goldin’s older sister Barbara who ultimately died by suicide when Goldin was 11. Goldin has said that her parents “didn’t have any idea of what a child was and expected them to be perfect from the start.”

Goldin’s first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was based on her photographic journeys among the city’s gay and transgender  communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong. While living in downtown Boston at age 18, Goldin “fell in with the drag queens,” living with them and photographing them. Among her work from this period is Ivy wearing a fall, Boston (1973). Unlike some photographers who were interested in psychoanalyzing or exposing the queens, Goldin admired and respected their sexuality. Goldin said, “My desire was to show them as a third gender, as another sexual option, a gender option. And to show them with a lot of respect and love, to kind of glorify them because I really admire people who can recreate themselves and manifest their fantasies publicly. I think it’s brave”.

Goldin admitted to being romantically in love with a queen during this period of her life in a Q&A with Bomb “I remember going through a psychology book trying to find something about it when I was nineteen. There was one little chapter about it in an abnormal psych book that made it sound so … I don’t know what they ascribed it to, but it was so bizarre. And that’s where I was at that time in my life. I lived with them; it was my whole focus. Everything I did – that’s who I was all the time. And that’s who I wanted to be”.

Goldin’s work is most often presented in the form of a slideshow, and has been shown at film festivals; her most famous being a 45-minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. In the book Auto-Focus, her photographs are described as a way to “learn the stories and intimate details of those closest to her”. The book speaks of her uncompromising manner and style when photographing acts such as drug use, sex, violence, arguments, and traveling and references one of Goldin’s photographs “Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984” as an iconic image which she uses to reclaim her identity and her life.

Goldin’s work since 1995 has included a wide array of subject matter: collaborative book projects with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki; New York City skylines; uncanny landscapes (notably of people in water); her lover, Siobhan; and babies, parenthood and family life.

In 2000, her hand was injured and she currently retains less ability to turn it than in the past.

In 2017, in a speech in Brazil, Goldin revealed she was recovering from opioid addiction, specifically to OxyContin, after being prescribed the drug for a painful wrist. She had sought treatment for her addiction and battled through rehab. This led to her setting up a campaign called Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.) pursuing social media activism directed against the Sackler family for their involvement in Purdue Pharma, manufacturers of OxyContin. 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. Goldin became aware of the Sackler family in 2017.

In 2018, she organized a protest in the Sackler Wing’s Temple of Dendur at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The protest called for museums and other cultural institutions not to accept money from the Sackler family.

Also in 2018, she was one of several artists who participated in a $100 sale organized by Magnum Photos and Aperture to raise funds for Goldin’s opioid awareness group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now).

In February 2019, Goldin staged a protest at the Guggenheim Museum in New York over its acceptance of funding by the Sackler family. She also said that she would withdraw from a retrospective exhibition of her work at the National Portrait Gallery in London if they did not turn down a gift of £1 million from the Sacklers. The gallery subsequently said it would not proceed with the donation.

Two days after the National Portrait Gallery statement, the Tate group of British art galleries (Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, Tate St Ives and Tate Liverpool) announced it would no longer accept any gifts offered by members of the Sackler family, from whom it had received £4m. Tate Modern had been planning to display its copy of Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency slideshow, for a year from April 15, 2019. Goldin had not discussed the show with Tate.

Goldin identified that Tate, which has received Sackler money, paid her for one of the ten copies of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 2015, when she was deeply addicted to OxyContin. She says she spent some of the money on buying black market OxyContin, as doctors would no longer prescribe her the drug.

In July 2019, Goldin and others from the group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now staged a protest in the fountain at the Louvre in Paris. The protest was to try to persuade the museum to change the name of its Sackler wing, which is made up of 12 rooms. In November 2019, Goldin campaigned at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Goldin is bisexual.