PHOTO: Nan Goldin-Memory Lost

Nan Goldin is one of the most important artists of her generation, has significantly influenced the art of photography. First as a teenager in Boston in the 1960s, then in New York starting in the 1970s, Nan Goldin has taken intensely personal, spontaneous, sexual, and transgressive photographs of her family, friends, and lovers. In 1979 she presented her first slideshow in a New York City nightclub, and her richly colored, snap-shot-like photographs were soon heralded as a groundbreaking contribution to fine art photography.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fraenkel Gallery Archive

“Memory Lost”, the exhibition’s centerpiece of Nan Goldin’s solo exhibition, is a slideshow in which Goldin explores the darkness of drug addiction through images and recordings from her extensive archive. The exhibition also features dreamlike photographs from “Memory Lost”, along with a recent series of intimate portraits made at home during the pandemic. Projected in a darkened room, “Memory Lost”presents a haunting and emotional narrative comprised of outtakes drawn from Goldin’s archive of thousands of slides. Depicting scenes from her life and circle of friends, the 24-minute piece recounts the pain and fleeting moments of beauty in life lived through the lens of addiction. Presented for the first time on the West Coast, the piece includes a score commissioned from composer and musician Mica Levi, with additional music by CJ Calderwood and Soundwalk Collective, interwoven with Goldin’s own voice, answering machine tapes from the 1980s, and contemporary interviews. The still photographic prints from “Memory Lost” convey Goldin’s distinct sensibility with mysterious depictions of skies, beaches, animals, and crowds. Often blurred or overexposed, the images suggest luminous fragments from a partially remembered past. The most recent works in the exhibition were made at home during quarantine in 2020-21, portraying writer Thora Siemsen, who moved into Goldin’s apartment early in the pandemic. Tender, intimate, and quiet, the photographs exhibit the artist’s singular understanding of chiaroscuro, and mark Goldin’s rare return to portraiture.

After leaving home at age 13, Nan Goldin lived in foster homes and attended an alternative school in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Suspicious of middle-class myths of romantic love between the sexes and mourning a sister who took her own life in 1964, Goldin sought a substitute family for her own blood relations. In doing so, she became part of a group of alienated young men and women involved with drugs, sex, and violence. Much influenced by cinéma verité and no doubt aware of the work of American photographer Larry Clark, Goldin took up photography about 1971. Her first published works (1973) were black-and-white images of transvestites and transsexuals. In 1974 she began to study art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she embarked on an enormous portrait of her life, making hundreds of color transparencies of herself and her friends lying or sitting in bed, engaged in sexual play, recovering from physical violence against them, or injecting themselves with drugs. Her involvement in this hermetic world was revealed in a diaristic narrative sequence of often unfocused but strongly colored transparencies arranged as a slide show entitled “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1981). Accompanied by a musical score that mixed rock, blues, opera, and reggae, the presentation was initially shown in nightclubs and eventually in galleries. Goldin continued to work on this project throughout the 1980s, and it was reproduced in 1986 in book form. Continuing to photograph drag queens in the 1990s, she also created a series of images called, in reference to Edward Steichen’s humanistic and influential “Family of Man” exhibition of 1955, “The Family of Nan” (1990–92), in which she documented her friends’ AIDS-related deaths. She photographed Japanese youths while traveling in Asia, and in 1995 she published those images in the book “Tokyo Love: Spring Fever” (1994). In 1995 she also made a biographical film for the BBC titled “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (with filmmaker Edmund Coulthard). Throughout her career Goldin was involved in various causes, including efforts to end the U.S. opioid epidemic. She received treatment for her addiction to the painkiller OxyContin in 2017 and later recounted her experience in the magazine Artforum. She called on the Sackler family, philanthropists who made part of their fortune from the sale of the drug, to take responsibility for their role in the opioid crisis. Goldin also formed the advocacy group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.), which staged protests in such museums as the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Sackler Wing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to condemn the institutions’ use of funds from the family. Partly as a result of Goldin’s organized protests, a number of museums around the world removed the Sackler name from their galleries, education centres, and other public spaces in the early 2020s. In 2022 Goldin was the subject of Laura Portras’s documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”, which won the best film award at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary.

Photo: Nan Goldin, 1st days in quarantine, Brooklyn, NY, 2020, dye sublimation print on aluminum, 31 x 41 inches (framed) [78.1 x 104.1 cm], edition of 7, © Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery

Info: Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary Street, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA, USA, Duration: 2/3-29/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:30-17:30, Sat 11:00-17:00, https://fraenkelgallery.com/