Goldin’s photographs emerged from inside the communities she documented, collapsing the distance between observer and subject. Friends, lovers and herself appear through joy, violence, illness, sex and death, producing an autobiography inseparable from broader histories of queer life and the AIDS crisis. Later activism has further connected personal experience with institutional politics.

Nan Goldin (b. 1953) is an American photographer and activist whose The Ballad of Sexual Dependency transformed documentary photography through radical intimacy. She later founded P.A.I.N., campaigning against museum and pharmaceutical connections to the opioid crisis.