In the elevator at the Bauer, Venice, Italy, October 2013, image courtesy Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed gets an Oscar nomination

Director Laura Poitras’s film on the life of the artist already won the Golden Lion at Venice - now it's up for the ultimate documentary film accolade

When Phaidon.com spoke to Nan Goldin a few years back, around the publication of her book, Eden and After a part of the conversation centred on Goldin’s thoughts about family. Not surprising as the book (which you can still buy here features photographs of the children of her circle of friends - in essence, her own extended family - that she has hung with since her late Eighties New York days.

More recently though, it’s been a family of a very different kind who have preoccupied Goldin’s work and life; specifically the Sackler family whose company, Purdue Pharma, developed the opioid painkiller OxyContin.

In recent years, Goldin has repeatedly highlighted the link between OxyContin and the US opioid crisis via staged protests at art institutions that have historically taken money from members of the Sackler family. She has also founded a pressure group P.A.I.N - (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to bring about awareness of the issue.

At the time of our Eden and After interview with Nan, she gave us a little exclusive about her desire to move into film, revealing that she had three different books she wanted to get a scriptwriter for.

“I never knew you could have a scriptwriter until Claire Denis (Goldin confidante and director of Bastards, Chocolat and Beau Travail) introduced me to hers. So I need a screenwriter to adapt these. Each of them is something I’ve experienced in life. I want to make narrative films.”

Nan Goldin - Io in camouflage, NYC, 1994

Now she’s made a documentary – or rather, a documentary has been made about her, taking in much of her recent campaigning, her childhood in rural Maryland, her traumatic documentation of the AIDS crisis in New York and her subsequent transformation into global art star.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’s intimate documentary about Goldin, her art and her activism is released in the UK this Friday, January 27 and this week received a nomination in the category for Best Documentary at the Oscars, due to take place in March.

The film begins on March 10, 2018, the day Goldin turned up at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, protesting at the Temple of Dendur exhibition, in the Sackler wing. Accompanied by a number of fellow activists, Goldin entered the gallery chanting “Sacklers lie, thousands die.” Just months earlier, Goldin had revealed her opium addiction to the magazine Artforum. Goldin became hooked on the drug in 2014 after being prescribed OxyContin for surgery. At the height of her habit the artist was on 18 illegally acquired pills a day – a gigantic leap from the 3 pills a day she had initially been prescribed.

Poitras, who previously directed the 2014 Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, focuses on both Goldin’s work as an activist and her difficult childhood in Maryland, her ground-breaking work as an artist in New York’s downtown scene of the late 80s and early 90s, her addiction and eventual recognition as a major global artist. The film is structured in seven chapters, each of which begins with a photographic sequence or archival footage of a period of Goldin's life and then transitions to footage of her recent protests with P.A.I.N.

The most dramatic and moving scene comes when Goldin at last comes face to face with the Sacklers, via a Zoom call, as part of her legal proceedings against them. Goldin talks of her addiction and overdose while the camera focuses on her trembling hand, entwined with that of fellow P.A.I.N. activist Megan Kapler.

Nan Goldin - Isabella and Guido’s game, the statue, Sardinia, 2003

Goldin is the main narrator of the film, with additional interviews from journalist Patrick Radden Keefe and Megan Kapler. The film premiered last September, at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, where it was awarded the Golden Lion. The Oscar nomination is in the category for Best Documentary. Poitras previously won the award in 2015 for her Snowden doc.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshedgets a widespread UK cinema release this week and is now streaming in the US.

You can see and purchase some of the work that made Goldin a recognised global artist here and here.

Nan Goldin - Valerie in the Taxi, Paris, 2001

Nan Goldin: Valérie in the taxi, Paris (2001)

Format: Cibachrome
Sheet size: 406 x 610 mm (16 x 24 inches)
Image size: 356 x 533 mm (14 x 21 inches)
Box: 689 x 464 mm (27 1/8 x 18 1/8 inches)
Printed in 2004 in an edition of 100 plus 5 artist's proofs
All copies are signed and numbered by Nan Goldin

Special edition of The Devil's Playground that is beautifully bound, individually signed and numbered, and presented in a specially made box together with an original print, also signed and numbered by Nan Goldin

Valerie in the taxi, Paris captures a candid moment between friends, laid-back but with an apparent intensity to Valerie's conversation that the camera rarely captures.

Renowned for tender, honest, revealing, intimate and sometimes brutal pictures of herself and what she calls her extended family, Nan Goldin (b.1953) is so close to her subjects that they hardly remember she is there. Like a visual diary her photographs tell the stories of emotional turmoil, passion and peace. This image captures Nan's friends in moments of total self-absorption, moments into which Nan has been allowed after long periods of building up intense relationships and trust with her subjects, so that the camera is as much a part of the relationship as she is.

Goldin's pictures are both courageously candid and affirmative, documenting the births and deaths, the mundane and the ecstasies, the drugs and rehab of her life as a photographer, friend and lover.

Specifications:

Format: Hardback
Size: 300 × 225 mm (11 7/8 × 8 7/8 in)
Pages: 504 pp
Illustrations: 0 illustrations
ISBN: 9780714844220

Nan Goldin was born in 1953 in Washington, DC. She grew up there and in Boston, where she began to take photographs at the age of 15. In 1978 she moved to New York and then to Berlin where she lived and worked from 1991 to 1993. She currently lives and works in Paris. Since the early 1970s, Goldin has taken numerous photographs of her friends and 'family', which form a unique corpus of work. She is most famous for her Ballad of Sexual Dependency photographs, a constantly changing slide show of approximately 750 photographs set to music. Goldin's life and friends became the focus of her work - a diary of friends and lovers in Europe and America, in the underground and gay scene. Since the 1980s Goldin's photographs have been exhibited internationally, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museu Reina Sofia in Madrid.

'beautiful'
Diva