Goldin met her lover, Brian, an ex-marine working as a bartender, at Tin Pan Alley in New York City. There, at the bar on West 49th Street, an intense romantic relationship began. Their tumultuous and passionate relationship was marked by drug addiction and physical infatuation. Many of Nan Goldin’s photos feature Brian, but few are as intimate as this one. Now living in Lincoln, Goldin enrolled at the Satya Community School when she turned 16. One of the staff members at the school introduced young Goldin to photography. Scarred by the sudden death of her sister, Goldin started photographing other people in her life as a way to preserve them and their shared moments through an image. She also started using photography as a political tool to visualize and capture intimacy and humanity in America’s nonconforming subgroups.

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ The Devil's Playground presents a major collection of photographs by Nan Goldin (b.1953). Since the 1980s, Goldin has consistently created photographs that are intimate and compelling: they tell personal stories of relationships, friendships and identity, while chronicling different eras and exposing the passage of time. Patti LaBelle Aids awareness poster from the 1980’s produced by the United States Public Health Service; Public Health Service, HHS, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Photograph of Nan Goldin taken at the Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2022 ceremony in Berlin, 2023; Elena Ternovaja, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia CommonsShe received her BAFA (Fine Arts, Cum Laude) from the University of Pretoria in 2016 and is currently pursuing her MA in Visual Arts at the University of Johannesburg. Her work has been represented locally and internationally in numerous exhibitions, residencies, and art fairs. Attewell was selected as a Sasol New Signatures finalist (2016, 2017) and a Top 100 finalist for the ABSA L’Atelier (2018). Attewell was selected as a 2018 recipient of the Young Female Residency Award, founded by Benon Lutaaya. One of Goldin’s most notable works is Nan one month after being battered (1984) in which she documented the end of their relationship after she suffered dramatic physical abuse. The iconic image marks Goldin’s decision to reclaim her life, identity, and independence. The Devil’s Playground presents a major collection of photographs by Nan Goldin (b.1953). Since the 1980s, Goldin has consistently created photographs that are intimate and compelling: they tell personal stories of relationships, friendships and identity, while chronicling different eras and exposing the passage of time. In 2000, Goldin injured her hand badly, which greatly impacted her work. She was prescribed to use OxyContin by her doctor to treat the pain in her wrist. This drug, however, led to serious addiction, and in 2017, during a speech in Brazil, Goldin announced that she was suffering from opioid addiction. Around this time, Goldin attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts from which she graduated in 1978. After her graduation, she moved to New York City, where she continued to photograph the subcultures of the city, along with the post-punk new-wave music scene.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (2012) by Nan Goldin, edited by Mark Holborn, Marvin Heiferman, and Suzanne Fletcher The documentary and confessional style of this self-portrait are like the images she took of other people in her life, which are almost always raw, honest, and emotional, but glamorous. The photograph, Goldin claims, marks the end of a long-term abusive relationship with a man whom she loved deeply.Her work was showcased at the 2019 and 2022 Contemporary Istanbul with Berman Contemporary and her latest solo exhibition, titled Sociogenesis: Resilience under Fire, curated by Els van Mourik, was exhibited in 2020 at Berman Contemporary in Johannesburg. Attewell also exhibited at the main section of the 2022 Investec Cape Town Art Fair.

Chrisél Attewell (b. 1994) is a multidisciplinary artist from South Africa. Her work is research-driven and experimental. Inspired by current socio-ecological concerns, Attewell’s work explores the nuances in people’s connection to the Earth, to other species, and to each other. She works with various mediums, including installation, sculpture, photography, and painting, and prefers natural materials, such as hemp canvas, oil paint, glass, clay, and stone. Through her images, Goldin sought to remove the taboo linked to discussing important issues in our societies that are often ignored and overlooked. This monograph brings to light both the sources of Goldin's inspiration and her life as a prominent contemporary artist: she is internationally recognized as one of today's leading photographers. Born in Washington DC, Goldin grew up in Boston where she began taking photographs at the age of 15. She has since lived in New York, Bangkok, Berlin, Tokyo and Paris, amassing an extensive body of work that represents an often disconcertingly seductive photographic portrait of our time. After her sister’s suicide, Goldin began relying on marijuana to help her cope. She also started dating older men and left home when she was only 13 or 14 years old. The Devil's Playground presents a major collection of photographs by Nan Goldin (b.1953). Since the 1980s, Goldin has consistently created photographs that are intimate and compelling: they tell personal stories of relationships, friendships and identity, while chronicling different eras and exposing the passage of time.Goldin’s work from 1995 onwards broadened to include multiple book collaborations, urban landscapes of the New York City Skyline, and intriguing images of people in the water. Goldin never married or had children of her own, but she started increasingly documenting domestic life, with multiple images of children, babies, and family life. The suicide of Goldin’s sister and her tumultuous and traumatic childhood continued to plague Goldin. This can most notably be seen in her 2006 exhibition, Chasing a Ghost. The exhibition was an installation that included moving images and sound, marking a turn in Goldin’s work to the more cinematic.

Her relationship with the drag queens that she photographed was one of admiration. She explains that she was drawn to their bravery and the freedom of their sexual fluidity and that she wanted to portray them with love. An example of one of these early works is Ivy with Marilyn, Boston (1973). This famous photograph features two of Goldin’s friends, drag queens Misty and Jimmy Paulette, on their way to the New York City Pride March. The image is a close-up shot of the two sitting in a taxi, on their way to join their float at the march. The drag queens are sitting closely next to each other, their gaze directly into the camera. Goldin described The Ballad as her “visual diary,” but it is a diary that projects. Over the years, I have memorised the photographs and kept them as imaginary acetates, ready to reframe situations in my own life through Goldin’s lens. There is an inclusivity in her work. Not only in the faces that appear again and again, and that you begin to recognise almost as your own friends, but in the hand she extends with her photography. The promise that there is a community for everyone, the reassurance that we all belong to someone. In living with and beside her work, we belong to her, if no one else. The final photograph of The Devil’s Playground , is a close-up of the carving on a gravestone in Lisbon: You Never Did Anything Wrong. The book recommendations for Nan Goldin are unlike many others you will find in articles on artists. This is because, in many ways, the publications recommended below are the works of art themselves. Goldin often collaborated with publishers to create books that held entire series of her photographs taken over decades.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Of her most photographed subjects at this time were Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. Nan Goldin’s photos featured Mueller so many times that a separate publication was dedicated to them. The book Cookie Mueller was published in 1991. Mueller starred in various John Water films, and Goldin described her as “a cross between Tobacco Road and a Hollywood B-Girl”. Many of Nan Goldin’s photographs feature Mueller’s wedding to Vittorio Scarpati, her relationship with her son, and her battle with HIV/AIDS.