Doses, Drag, and Defiance: Nan Goldin’s Queer Resistance
Nan Goldin’s photographic work is deeply rooted in personal experience yet resonates far beyond the boundaries of autobiography. Through her unflinching lens, Goldin has documented the intimate lives of queer communities, survivors of domestic violence, those affected by AIDS, and individuals struggling with addiction. Her engagement with these themes, alongside her later activism. particularly through P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), has positioned her not only as a pioneering photographer but as a cultural figure whose influence extends across visual art, LGBTQ+ rights, and political resistance. As art critic Luc Sante notes, “Goldin’s lens is a social microscope, refusing to segregate the margins from the center; to be queer is to be human, with all the contradictions that entails” (Sante 45).
This following contains content that may be distressing to some readers. It includes discussions of domestic violence, sexual trauma, addiction, drug use, death, and mourning, as well as themes related to the AIDS epidemic and the marginalization of LGBTQ+ individuals. These subjects are discussed throughout Nan Goldin’s photographic work and activism, which often confronts difficult truths with unflinching honesty. Reader discretion is advised, particularly for those who may find such material triggering.
Nan Goldin was born on September 12, 1953, in Washington, D.C., and raised in a middle-class Jewish family in the Boston suburbs of Swampscott and later Lexington, Massachusetts. Her upbringing, as she has described in interviews, was fraught with repression and familial tension, particularly surrounding her older sister Barbara’s struggles with mental illness and eventual suicide in 1965. Goldin has cited this tragedy as formative, noting that witnessing Barbara’s death and the institutional silencing of her sexuality shaped her understanding of how societal repression could destroy lives (Jewish Women’s Archive; “Nan Goldin,” Wikipedia).
At the age of eighteen, Goldin enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1971, where she studied alongside now-celebrated photographers David Armstrong and Philip-Lorca diCorcia (The Art Story). During her time in Boston’s South End and Chinatown neighborhoods, Goldin became immersed in the local queer and drag scene, forming close bonds with individuals who would later become her earliest subjects. One of her first published works, Ivy Wearing a Fall, Boston (1973), depicts Ivy, a drag performer, and demonstrates Goldin’s early commitment to representing marginalized identities with respect and authenticity (“Ivy Wearing a Fall,” Wikipedia; The Art Story).
After graduating in 1977, Goldin relocated to New York City and embedded herself in the vibrant downtown arts scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her photographs during this period capture a self-fashioned family of artists, drag queens, sex workers, and musicians navigating joy and hardship amidst a backdrop of urban grit and the emerging AIDS crisis. Goldin frequently presented her work as live slideshows in venues such as the Mudd Club and the Pyramid Club, where images were projected in rhythm with soundtracks by artists like the Velvet Underground and Nina Simone (OpenEdition Journals; Ethics of Care).
This participatory format, intimate, raw, and often ephemeral, shaped her most famous and enduring work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which began as a slideshow performance and later culminated in a landmark 1986 photobook published by Aperture (Goldin; Fundació Antoni Tàpies). As the AIDS crisis escalated and queer life faced further marginalization, Goldin’s images offered both a personal archive and a cultural intervention, chronicling lives too often erased from mainstream history.
Nan Goldin’s oeuvre comprises deeply intimate portraits that chronicle both her own life and the lives of her friends, lovers, and chosen family; particularly within LGBTQ+ and marginalized communities.
Taken in 1973 during Goldin’s early years in Boston, Ivy Wearing a Fall depicts Ivy, a drag performer whose self-presentation challenged traditional gender binaries. The photograph’s stark black-and-white composition and close framing signal Goldin’s desire to portray Ivy not as spectacle, but as an empowered figure of gender nonconformity. Her respectful documentation of drag culture diverged sharply from the exploitative approaches of many contemporaneous photographers (The Art Story; “Ivy Wearing a Fall, Boston,” Wikipedia).
This intimate portrait, taken in Goldin’s own apartment, shows the artist lying in bed beside her then-partner Brian. Despite their physical closeness, the emotional tension is palpable; Goldin averts her gaze while Brian stares directly away from the camera. The image exemplifies Goldin’s collapsing of the public and private spheres and hints at the abuse that would later mark their relationship (Goldin; Cotton 87). It remains a defining image of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, evoking themes of vulnerability, desire, and detachment.
A self-portrait taken in the aftermath of domestic violence, this image captures Goldin’s bruised and swollen face as she stares unflinchingly at the viewer. According to Charlotte Cotton, the photograph “confronts domestic violence with an intensity that moves beyond documentation” (88). It marked a turning point in Goldin’s work; personal trauma became politicized, and the image became an icon of feminist and queer resilience (Goldin).
Initially presented as a live slideshow accompanied by music, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was published by Aperture in 1986 and comprises over 700 color photographs taken between 1979 and 1986. The series documents Goldin’s circle, drag queens, lovers, addicts, and friends, grappling with intimacy, addiction, and mortality. As critic Luc Sante describes it, the work functions as “a diary in pictures” (Sante 45). Jessica Morefield observes that it operates as “a collective diary,” eschewing aestheticization to make “ethical demands on the viewer” (62). Today, Ballad is housed in major collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum (The Art Story; Goldin).
In this vibrant color photograph, Goldin captures drag queens Misty and Jimmy Paulette riding in a taxi, dressed in full regalia. The intimacy of the setting, confined yet public, highlights the liminal space they occupy as queer figures in a heteronormative city. As Rebecca Turner notes, these “transit portraits” emphasize both visibility and vulnerability, underscoring the complexity of queer presence in urban space (Turner 54).
Taken following a Pride parade, this photograph shows Jimmy Paulette. The bold colors and confident stride are juxtaposed with the indifference of the crowd behind him. Andy Grundberg suggests that such images “articulate a paradox of queer visibility,” where affirmation and danger coexist (Grundberg 232). This duality reinforces Goldin’s ability to convey both celebration and alienation in queer public life.
This tender photograph captures two men, one of whom was dying of AIDS, sharing an intimate kiss. Shot during Goldin’s residency in Paris, the image offers a profound meditation on love, mortality, and memory. Film theorist Laura Mulvey describes the image as collapsing “the distance between spectator and subject,” inviting empathy over voyeurism (19). The photograph was later included in her portfolio The Family of Nan (Britannica).
This image depicts the wedding of Cookie Mueller and Vittorio Scarpati, both close friends of Goldin, in a modest Manhattan apartment. The informal setting and emotional sincerity foreground queer resilience in the face of institutional exclusion. As Mary Beaufort argues, the wedding photographs “gave a visual testament to the legitimacy of queer love and ceremony” long before marriage equality (102).
Goldin returned to document Cookie at her husband’s funeral just three years later. Cookie kneels beside the open casket in mourning. Art historian Jack Halberstam contends that the photograph “resists redemption narratives” and dwells in “the liminal space between life and death” (140). It is emblematic of how Goldin transforms personal grief into collective memory, particularly within the context of the AIDS crisis (The Guardian).
While traveling through Europe, Goldin took this solitary, introspective photograph of a nearly empty hotel room. The dim lighting and vacant bed emphasize dislocation and fatigue. Vince Aletti notes that it “foregrounds the artist’s own displacement,” reinforcing her status as both participant and observer in the lives she photographs (112).
This image captures performance artist Joey Arias preparing for Wigstock, a New York drag festival. The cluttered background and candid posture reflect the grit and beauty of queer performance. As Martha Langford observes, Goldin’s drag series “blur[s] boundaries between performance and life,” grounding flamboyance in resilience (102).
This long-term project showcases women in various stages of pregnancy and motherhood, many of them queer. Sharon Harper writes that Goldin “repositions maternity within feminist art history,” insisting that caregiving and the domestic sphere are worthy of artistic attention (56). These images expand Goldin’s practice beyond nightlife into radical acts of maternal representation (ICA Boston).
Commissioned by the Louvre, Scopophilia juxtaposes Goldin’s contemporary photographs with classical artworks. She positions images of her friends, often nude or in acts of intimacy, beside canonical paintings and sculptures, interrogating the gaze and erotic desire. Mulvey argues that this installation constitutes a “queer reappropriation” of museum space, where desire is centered on marginalized bodies (17; The Art Newspaper).
This multimedia triptych installation revisits the suicide of Goldin’s sister Barbara. Combining family photographs, interviews with women institutionalized for mental illness, and Catholic iconography, the work creates a feminist counter-history. Sandra Q. Orcutt notes that it “situates Goldin’s personal grief within the long history of female martyrdom and mental health stigma” (75). The installation has been shown at Temple Church in London and Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (The Guardian; FT).
This video installation incorporates slideshows, iPhone footage, and audio recordings to convey the fragmentary nature of addiction. Commissioned by the Guggenheim, it is Goldin’s most direct meditation on her experience with OxyContin dependency. Sebastian Smee writes that the work “implicates viewers in the unraveling of recollection,” forcing them to confront the disorientation of addiction (Smee). Memory Lost represents a thematic culmination of Goldin’s interest in trauma, survival, and memory (Aperture).
Nan Goldin’s approach to photography has always been rooted in an ethic of intimacy and immediacy. Her images are neither carefully staged nor conventionally composed. Instead, they emerge from the lived experience of her relationships, environments, and communities. Goldin’s artistic practice evolved in tandem with the very spaces she inhabited, queer bars, bedrooms, nightclubs, apartments, and, eventually, institutions, and her style has maintained a distinct immediacy throughout.
Goldin developed her method in the gritty, bohemian underground of Boston and New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Her early works were not displayed in white-cube galleries but rather projected as slideshows in venues like the Mudd Club and Pyramid Club. These presentations paired her photographs with soundtracks by artists such as the Velvet Underground and Nina Simone, creating a sensory and emotionally immersive atmosphere. These performances, as noted by Ethics of Care, were “ephemeral and collective,” functioning more like rites of remembrance than traditional exhibitions (Ethics of Care; OpenEdition Journals).
By the late 1980s, Goldin’s work had entered mainstream art institutions, though her aesthetic remained defiantly raw. Her use of direct flash, rich color saturation, and a snapshot aesthetic, often developed on consumer-grade film, imbued her images with both documentary authenticity and emotional resonance. As the Art Story notes, “Goldin’s photographs are spontaneous, confessional, and unpolished,” a rejection of the formalism dominating art photography at the time (“Nan Goldin,” The Art Story).
Stylistically, Goldin’s photographs rely on close framing and emotionally charged subject matter. Her camera does not position her as an outsider looking in, but as a participant deeply embedded in the scenes she captures. Her work has been compared to that of Diane Arbus and Larry Clark; however, unlike Arbus, who maintained a degree of distance, Goldin’s photographs are of people she loved and lived alongside. This distinction imbues her work with a sense of ethical urgency and care.
Beginning in the 1990s, major institutions began to acquire Goldin’s work and recognize her influence on contemporary photography. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency became a staple of museum collections, including those at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her 1996 mid-career retrospective, Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, toured internationally and cemented her reputation as one of the most important photographers of her generation (Goldin; Sante).
More recently, the 2024–2026 retrospective This Will Not End Well, opened at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, marks a pivotal shift in how Goldin’s body of work is understood. Curated thematically and presented entirely through moving images, the exhibition features works like Memory Lost (2019–2021) and Sisters, Saints and Sibyls (2004–2022), recontextualizing her legacy as one that spans not only photography but also video, installation, and activism (The Art Newspaper; ArtReview). These later works reflect an evolution from diaristic narrative toward broader socio-political engagement, especially around addiction, mental illness, and feminist critique.
Critics have noted that Goldin’s commitment to unfiltered subjectivity remains consistent, even as her media and venues have changed. As Laura Mulvey has written, Goldin’s later installations “force viewers to navigate between personal testimony and political indictment,” particularly in works like Memory Lost, where addiction is framed as both personal tragedy and structural failure (Mulvey 20).
Thus, while Goldin’s artistic practice originated in countercultural resistance and queer kinship, her current standing within global institutions offers an opportunity to redefine what belongs in museums, and who gets to be remembered. Her exhibitions challenge curators, audiences, and patrons alike to confront the discomforts of truth, memory, and complicity.
Nan Goldin's activism is as urgent and confrontational as her art. While her photography has long challenged the social marginalization of queer communities and survivors of trauma, Goldin’s formal entry into public activism began with the founding of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2017. Since then, she has become one of the most visible artist-activists in the fight against the opioid epidemic, museum accountability, and more recently, the repression of Palestinian advocacy.
Goldin’s founding of P.A.I.N. emerged directly from personal experience. After being prescribed OxyContin for surgery in 2014, she became addicted, overdosed, and was revived with Narcan. Her recovery inspired her to hold the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, accountable for their role in the opioid crisis. In 2017, she publicly revealed her addiction in an essay published in Artforum, writing, “I decided to make the private public by calling out the real pushers: Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family” (Goldin, qtd. in Kino).
P.A.I.N.'s primary objective has been to pressure museums to sever financial ties with the Sacklers, who for decades donated heavily to cultural institutions to launder their reputations. The group staged dramatic interventions in spaces such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Louvre, performing “die-ins,” scattering empty prescription bottles, and chanting slogans like “Shame on Sackler” and “Crisis is Culture” (Time; Hyperallergic).
Goldin’s tactics are intentionally confrontational yet nonviolent. “The Sackler name has poisoned art institutions,” she declared. “We’re here to remind people that culture cannot survive if it’s built on the suffering of others” (Goldin, qtd. in Kino). Her interventions have had measurable success: in 2021, the Met removed the Sackler name from several galleries, followed by similar moves at the Guggenheim, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Louvre (Wikipedia; Hyperallergic).
P.A.I.N. has collaborated with grassroots organizations such as Truth Pharm and Relatives Against Purdue Pharma, amplifying the voices of those directly impacted by opioid addiction. In 2020, the coalition helped protest a controversial bankruptcy settlement that would have granted the Sacklers legal immunity despite their wealth (The New Yorker).
Goldin’s activism was chronicled in the Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), directed by Laura Poitras. The film juxtaposes Goldin’s life and photographic work with the growing momentum of P.A.I.N.’s protests, presenting a powerful portrait of how personal testimony can catalyze structural change (Poitras).
Before founding P.A.I.N., Goldin had long used her art to dismantle normative narratives around gender, sexuality, and domesticity. Her early photographs challenged mainstream depictions of gender by elevating drag queens, trans women, and queer intimacy, not as exotic or tragic, but as essential expressions of beauty, grief, and humanity.
Her feminist politics are likewise central to her practice. From self-portraits documenting domestic abuse to photographic series on motherhood like From Here to Maternity (1986–2000), Goldin’s work interrogates the social regulation of women’s bodies. As critic Sharon Harper notes, “Goldin repositions maternity within feminist art history, insisting that the work of mothering is a radical act of care” (Harper 56).
Luc Sante summarizes Goldin’s overall politics as a photographic ethics of empathy: “Her lens is a social microscope, refusing to segregate the margins from the center” (Sante 45). Goldin’s art refuses the sanitized aesthetic of institutional photography and instead centers lived experience, emotional immediacy, and unfiltered presence.
In 2024 and 2025, Goldin’s activism extended into international political territory as she began speaking out in support of Palestinian rights. During the opening of her retrospective This Will Not End Well at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie in November 2024, Goldin gave a searing speech in which she labeled Israel’s military assault on Gaza and Lebanon genocide and denounced the German government’s criminalization of pro-Palestinian expression (The Art Newspaper; Dazed Digital).
She criticized the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, drawing on her own identity as a Jewish American to condemn what she described as “chilling McCarthyist times” for artists and intellectuals. “My responsibility as an artist is to witness. Any silence is complicity,” she told The Guardian (O’Hagan).
Goldin also participated in an April 2025 fundraising initiative called “Pictures for Purpose,” selling prints to benefit Sulala Animal Rescue in Gaza, an organization aiding animals and civilians impacted by the ongoing conflict. She stated that her support stemmed from “an unbearable grief watching the genocide unfold in real time” (Dazed Digital).
Her stance has provoked a wide spectrum of reactions; praise from human rights advocates, alongside denunciations from pro-Israel organizations and some cultural institutions. Nonetheless, Goldin has remained resolute in aligning her artistic visibility with political responsibility. As she told The Art Newspaper, “I have lost friends before for taking positions. I am willing to lose more.”
From her earliest exhibitions to her most recent activist interventions, Nan Goldin has generated complex critical responses that span admiration, discomfort, and academic inquiry. Her work has long challenged the limits of what is considered representable, pushing photography beyond aesthetics into the terrain of ethical and political reckoning. Critics and scholars alike have praised her for reshaping the landscape of contemporary photography by centering marginalized lives, while others have interrogated the implications of her raw, confessional style.
Early reviews of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) emphasized its visceral emotional impact and its bold rejection of formal photographic conventions. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Luc Sante described Ballad as “a diary in pictures,” noting that it "glorifies nobody" and "romanticizes nothing" (Sante 45). This honesty, Sante suggested, was what gave Goldin’s images their power to move, unsettle, and endure. Other critics noted the potential risks of aestheticizing trauma. Charlotte Cotton, in her seminal text The Photograph as Contemporary Art, acknowledges this tension, arguing that while Goldin’s images of addiction and violence do run the risk of sensationalism, their strength lies in the “depth of emotional authorship” that defies objectification (Cotton 88–89).
Goldin’s work has been positioned within feminist art history for its direct engagement with domestic abuse, female suffering, and queer resilience. In Nan One Month After Being Battered (1984), for example, the choice to publicly display a bruised self-portrait reframed intimate partner violence as a structural, gendered issue. Feminist scholars have interpreted this image as an act of resistance, a refusal to be silenced or rendered invisible. The rawness of this act is amplified by its context: a woman documenting her own trauma with a flash camera, challenging both the male gaze and the passive role of the female subject.
Laura Mulvey’s foundational theory of the male gaze, articulated in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” provides a useful framework for understanding how Goldin’s work disrupts objectifying visual regimes. Whereas mainstream cinema enacts what Mulvey calls “to-be-looked-at-ness,” Goldin’s photographs foreground the gaze of the subject and the emotional interdependence between photographer and photographed (Mulvey 17). In works like Gotscho Kissing Gilles, Paris (1993), the intimacy is so visceral that the viewer feels implicated; not as voyeur, but as witness.
Queer theory has also embraced Goldin’s archive as a vital contribution to what Jack Halberstam calls “the queer counter-archive,” a body of work that resists linear time, heteronormative family structures, and sanitized historical memory. Halberstam argues that Goldin’s photographs, especially those depicting the AIDS crisis, “rescue what the straight, heteronormative archive would erase” (Halberstam 142). In this reading, images such as Cookie at Vittorio’s Casket (1989) function not only as personal tributes but as acts of communal preservation.
The domestic, maternal, and feminine dimensions of Goldin’s later work, particularly in From Here to Maternity (1986–2000), have prompted feminist scholars to reassess the boundaries between public and private, serious and sentimental. Sharon Harper, writing in Feminist Art Review, asserts that Goldin’s maternal portraits “reposition maternity within feminist art history, insisting that the work of mothering is a radical act of care” (Harper 58). This challenges traditional hierarchies that have historically excluded motherhood from fine art.
Critics have also discussed Goldin’s impact on institutional critique. Her activism through P.A.I.N. has reframed the artist’s role in cultural accountability. As art historian Andrea Fraser argues, institutional critique involves “the exposure of power relations” in the art world (Fraser 232). Goldin’s direct action against museums complicit in the opioid crisis, as seen in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), exemplifies this critique in both form and content. Her protests are themselves performative and photographic, recorded, disseminated, and archived, becoming part of her evolving body of work.
Recent criticism has expanded to include her advocacy for Palestine, which remains a polarizing stance within the art world. While some critics have accused Goldin of overreach, others see her intervention as consistent with her ethical commitment to visibility and justice. In The Guardian, Sean O’Hagan lauded her courage, writing that she “refuses to separate art from life, or art from moral responsibility” (O’Hagan). Such commentary positions Goldin among a generation of artists whose practices bridge aesthetic inquiry and political urgency.
Taken together, these scholarly and critical responses reveal that Goldin’s work is not merely documentary or autobiographical; it is fundamentally transformative. It redefines the relationship between photographer and subject, viewer and image, art and activism. Whether viewed through the lens of feminist ethics, queer historiography, or institutional critique, Goldin’s work demands engagement. It compels us not just to look, but to bear witness.
Nan Goldin’s career exemplifies the power of art to disrupt, illuminate, and transform. Over the course of five decades, she has developed a body of work that not only documents the lives of those on the margins, queer communities, survivors of abuse, people living with addiction, but also dignifies them with visibility, emotional resonance, and agency. Her photographs are not passive representations; they are acts of witness and solidarity.
From the intimate and unflinching portraits of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency to the political urgency of Memory Lost and her direct-action campaigns through P.A.I.N., Goldin consistently resists silence. Whether in the form of a bruised self-portrait, a kiss between AIDS patients, or a funeral vigil for a lost friend, Goldin’s images insist on the truth of lived experience; even when that truth is painful, stigmatized, or invisible in the broader cultural record.
Her visual language is democratic. It emerges from lived intimacy, not detached observation. It honors drag queens and mothers, lovers and mourners, without exoticizing them. Goldin’s queer gaze, empathic, defiant, and unrelenting, has redefined contemporary photography and helped shape visual culture’s understanding of gender, sexuality, trauma, and care.
Her activism has only strengthened the urgency of her art. By calling out the complicity of major institutions in the opioid epidemic and speaking out for Palestinian human rights, Goldin has extended her photographic ethics into direct action. Her work reminds us that the artist is never apolitical; that silence, especially in times of injustice, is a choice with consequences.
Ultimately, Nan Goldin’s legacy lies in the radical honesty of her images and the courage with which she continues to confront power. Her archive is not merely a record of the past but a call to action: to see, to remember, to resist, and to hold space for lives too often discarded by dominant narratives. In doing so, she offers a powerful blueprint for what it means to make art that matters.
References:
Beaufort, Mary. Queer Matrimony in the Shadow of AIDS: Cookie Mueller’s Wedding in Nan Goldin’s Photographs. Journal of Queer Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, June 2018, pp. 98–115.
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Cotton, Charlotte. The Photograph as Contemporary Art. Thames & Hudson, 2014.
Dazed Digital. Nan Goldin Is Selling Prints to Raise Funds for Gaza Animal Welfare. Dazed, Accessed 22 Feb. 2025, www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/66605/1/nan-goldin-print-sale-gaza.
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The warning works! As does the article. We have a choice. We can ignore what is uncomfortable or we can do what Nan did. Make it front and center.
There is a reason creatives are burn with the eye and the voice. To use it. She did.