The Other Side

Nan Goldin is one of the most eminent photographers of our times, and today lives and works between New York, Paris and Berlin. Given her first camera at the age of 15, she began taking Polaroids of herself and those around her. In 1972 she moved in with a group of drag queens in Boston, starting her lifelong passion for photographing her queer and transsexual communities. In 1978 Goldin moved to New York City, where she presented slideshows in nightclubs and underground cinemas; her best known, ¿The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,¿ was published as a landmark book in 1986. In the nineties Goldin relocated to Berlin where she published A Double Life with David Armstrong and the first edition of The Other Side. In 2000 she again moved to Paris, where she was invited to create site-specific works at the Louvre and now Versailles. In 2018 Goldin and her colleagues founded P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a direct action group fighting the pharmaceutical companies and advocating for addiction treatment in the mounting opioid crisis. The book has been an important medium for Goldin over the decades; her publications with Steidl include The Beautiful Smile (2008) and Diving for Pearls (2016).