In 1979, Nan Goldin began showing a series of slides in public.
Photos of her friends, her lovers, herself. Bodies in unmade beds, made-up faces in smoky bars, embraces in tiny kitchens, gazes lost in bathroom mirrors. The series is called “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”. It never really ended… Goldin reworked it, re-exhibited it, expanded it for decades. To this day, it contains over 700 images.
What strikes you immediately about Goldin’s work is the total absence of distance. She does not photograph her subjects… she photographs her life. These people are her friends, her lovers, her chosen family. The drag queens of 1970s Boston, the New York artists of the 80s, the victims of the AIDS epidemic that decimated her community one by one. She is in it. Completely. The camera is not an observation tool… it is a way to hold on.
She photographs her own life with the same relentlessness. In 1984, her partner beats her violently. She photographs herself a month later, face swollen, left eye still red with blood. The image is called “Nan One Month After Being Battered”. She hides nothing. She does not look for symbols, metaphors, or staging… just the facts, laid bare, in all their quiet brutality.
What Goldin invents, without necessarily having named it, is the extimate before the word existed. The private diary made public, not for confession but to say: I am here, we are here, all of this existed. Photography as an act of resistance against forgetting. Against disappearance. Against the death of friends taken by AIDS, against the violence done to bodies, against an era that preferred not to look.
Her work resonates today with unexpected relevance. From 2017 onwards, Goldin led a public and radical campaign against the Sackler family, the makers of OxyContin, the opioid that ravaged millions of American lives and that nearly killed her as well. She organised die-ins in museums bearing the Sackler name, rained thousands of fake prescriptions from the balconies of the Louvre and the Guggenheim… and succeeded in having several museums remove the family name from their walls. The artist of the intimate became an activist. With the same intensity, the same refusal of detours.
What Nan Goldin brings to OuViePo is a permission. The permission to photograph yourself without filters, to document your own life without seeking to embellish or dramatise it… just to look at it squarely. Her constraints were dictated by urgency, by survival, by love. The OuViePo constraints in the Intimate domain owe her directly this idea: that the most ordinary photo diary, kept with regularity and honesty, can become a work of art.
No need to live in the New York clubs of the 80s. No need to live through an epidemic. You just need to look at your own life with the same seriousness, the same attention, the same refusal to look away.
It is harder than it seems.