Nan Goldin started her career in photography in high school, taking Polaroid pictures of her roommates in drag. Upending typical art hierarchies, she showed her work in her loft and in New York City nightclubs and bars in the late 1970s and ’80s, where the audience consisted “entirely of the people in the slide show, my lovers and friends.”
A pivotal component of Goldin's oeuvre is “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, a slideshow comprising approximately 900 candid colour photographs of herself and her friends, spanning from approximately 1979 to 2004.
The series “Scopophilia”, including the work “Hair” was exhibited at Gagosian Gallery in 2014. The Greek term scopophilia literally means “love of looking,” but also refers to the erotic pleasure derived from gazing at images of the body. Goldin’s “Scopophilia” is both a slideshow and a photographic series, begun in 2010 when she was given private access to the Musée du Louvre every Tuesday, while the museum was closed to the public. During these privileged sojourns, she wandered and photographed freely throughout the museum’s renowned collections of painting and sculpture. Mixing impressions of paintings and sculptures in the Louvre collections with her own images dating back to the late 1970s, the series constructs a lively dialogue between human subjects past and present.
Goldin's experiences at the Louvre confirmed that her artistic obsessions, such as sex, violence, rapture, despair and the mutability of gender, stem from deep imaginative currents in Western art history, mythology and religious iconography.
Goldin has been honored with several solo exhibitions at numerous acknowledged institutions such as Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London and Museum of Modern Art in New York, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, 2022, and The National Portrait Gallery, London, in summer 2023. She was awarded the Hasselblad Award in 2007 and was named a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2006. In 2012, Goldin was awarded the prestigious Edward MacDowell Medal, for her outstanding contribution to American culture and the arts.
Most of her career has also been defined by activism within her community: first, in the late 1980s, around the AIDS crisis, and then, beginning in 2017, Goldin started her activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), addressing the overdose crisis.