Nan Goldin: Shaping a Better Future Through Photography and Activism

PHOTO 2024 International Festival of Photography presents an art trail of 100 free photography exhibitions and outdoor art installations to explore across seven festival precincts in Melbourne, as well as five cities in regional Victoria – presented in partnership with over 50 museums and galleries, including ACMI, State Library Victoria, Museum of Australian Photography and the Centre for Contemporary Photography.

Towering over Flinders St, an elderly couple are seated, held in a gentle and tender embrace: My Parents on their Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary, 1989. The image is by Nan Goldin, a prolific American artist who, through her lifelong photographic practice, has captured a poignant, heart-wrenching and brutally honest display of what it is to live.

Goldin is an artist whose lens has not only captured the essence of human experience. She has also reflected the intricate interplay between the personal and the political. Since the 1970s, she has recorded her life, artfully navigating the complexities of life, love, pain, and societal upheavals, presenting them in a raw and unfiltered manner. She is the fly on the wall, and the camera is simply an additional limb. As Goldin herself has stated, “The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex”.

Her lens has unflinchingly captured critical issues including domestic violence, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York in the 80s/90s and the opioid crisis in the US. Goldin’s camera has been a tool for advocacy, empathy, and social justice: her lens shaping a better future.

Central to Goldin’s practice is her seminal work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Her groundbreaking series transcends the boundaries of art and documentary. The title plays in one part with the struggle people face in relationships of independence and intimacy, a struggle she has felt intimately. Writing in her incredible opus of the same name: “I’ve seen how mythology of romance contradicts the reality of coupling and perpetuates a definition of love that creates dangerous expectations.”

Indeed, pain and heartbreak can ultimately be the product of our relationships. Through fantasy or truth, this is the ballad we dance to. This is all visible in a relationship with a man that she describes as leaping from joy to serious abuse: a relationship caught very much within this dangerous ballad. As Goldin has further said, “the desire was constantly reinspired at the same time that the dissatisfaction became undeniable.” A statement she makes before describing an attack that left her black eyed and bruised, as in her work Nan one month after being battered, 1984.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was originally displayed as a slideshow performance in the New York clubs and bars frequented by her close community of friends. The series changed with each iteration as Goldin would add and remove photographs. This collection of images has continued to grow across her lifetime. A compendium of the print series now exists in the National Gallery of Australia collection, showing at the Art Gallery of Ballarat as part of PHOTO 2024 International Festival of Photography.

In PHOTO 2024, exhibitions have all responded to a central theme: “The Future is Shaped By Those Who Can See It”. The festival features ground-breaking artists: who have helped shape better futures and are fighting for social justice. There are few to have encapsulated this ethos more than Nan Goldin, whose activism extends beyond the realm of photography. Photography has truly become part of her activism: all are intertwined.

As a member of a generation ravaged by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the US in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Goldin experienced firsthand the devastating toll it took on her friends and loved ones. One series of images particularly highlights this reality, taken across only a 12-month period. Gilles and Gotscho, Paris (6 parts), 1992–1993 begins with two visually healthy young men, embracing, sitting together. The series slowly documents Gilles’ body being ravaged by illness. As Goldin has said, “In those days, people died really fast. I watched almost everyone I knew die.” Her photography became an archive of an epidemic unfolding. Thankfully, in our present day this is no longer the case for those with ready access to medication.

Forever capturing her life, Goldin has continued to fight for the community around her and beyond. Having personally overcome addiction to opioids prescribed to her post-surgery, in 2017 she founded the activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). The focus of P.A.I.N. is to bring justice to those affected by widespread addiction to opioids in the US. The organisation has particularly targeted the art patron Sackler family for their ongoing manufacturing, promotion and distribution of OxyContin.

Expertly chronicled in the Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, 2022, P.A.I.N.’s grassroots actions, sit-ins, boycotts, and further protests have led to the removal of the Sackler Family name from countless gallery walls. P.A.I.N. has brought a voice and compensation to those suffering amidst the ongoing opioid crisis.

Recently Goldin has maintained her strong activism. She cancelled a shoot with the New York Times Sunday Magazine in protest of what she sees as their unbalanced coverage of the ongoing conflict in Israel and Palestine. She is unafraid to use her platform to speak out against what she sees is injustice and inequality, embodying the ethos that the personal is indeed political.

PHOTO 2024 festival showcases My Parents on their Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary, 1989 alongside The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at the Art Gallery of Ballarat as a bold embodiment of her clear activism and deeply felt humanity in tender, intimate moments, often not revealed to a broader audience. Her photographs serve as both a mirror and a window, reflecting the world as it is while also offering glimpses of the world as it could be – a world guided by empathy, understanding and solidarity.